lane-handoff's ri_field is dead code in #280's shape: restart-intent piped into an awk that exits early, under pipefail, with no caller #319

What happens

lane-handoff:1091-1094 at 33ce26d (the same lines at 2be60ea and 502aec9):

ri_field() {   # <lane> <key>
	LANES_NO_FETCH=1 "$LANES_EDIT" restart-intent "$1" 2>/dev/null \
		| awk -F'\t' -v k="$2" '$1 == k { print $2; exit }'
}

• lane-handoff runs under set -uo pipefail (:120), so the function's status is the pipeline's. That awk exits at the line it wants. A restart-intent that writes again after the awk has exited gets SIGPIPE, and the status is 141 on timing alone. That is the shape of lane-handoff reads the lane lifecycle through a pipeline whose awk exits early, so under pipefail the read dies of SIGPIPE (exit 141) now and then and the handoff records no transition #280, which lane-handoff reads the lane lifecycle whole and parses it afterwards, so an awk that exits early can no longer turn lanes-edit.sh's SIGPIPE into a lifecycle that could not be read (fixes #280) #283 removed from the two lifecycle reads by reading lane-state whole into a variable and parsing it afterwards.
• Nothing calls it: git grep -n ri_field 33ce26d finds the definition and nothing else. The comment above it (:1089-1090) says "every caller below" tests for an empty answer; there is no caller below. Its sibling ri_load (:1099-1128) already reads restart-intent whole (:1104) and parses afterwards.

Why it matters

No live exposure today. The risk is the next caller, who would get a 141 on timing alone, as #280 did. No test can catch it: the function never runs.

Suggested fix

Delete it. If a one-field reader is wanted, read whole and then parse, as ri_load does.

This is lane tooling, which lane openRepoTools-3 owns; it is filed for lane 3 to take.

Found by: the completion of the independent review of #253 (NOTE D, 2026-10-22), which audited lane-handoff's early-exit pipelines at 2be60ea and found this function defined and never called. Filed on Brett Heap's word of 2026-10-23T14:21:33Z, by multiple choice: "ri_field dead code".

Lane: openRepoTools-5