Find the actual root cause: retention races the pending-episode file

Triggered a fresh Up First download on the phone and watched
androidx.work.workdb and show_fingerprints immediately after, live. A new
FingerprintWorker job appeared and succeeded within seconds, and
show_fingerprints updated for the first time since 2026-09-27 -- but instead
of advancing toward a second comparison, it just replaced the stale pending
episode with the new download. confirmedCount stayed 0.

That's checkAgainstPending's own designed fallback when pendingClipOf can't
re-decode the stored pending episode because its file is gone. And it is
gone: RetentionPolicy's grace period is one day, and Up First is a fast,
daily, ~15-30 minute news show that gets played through quickly. By the time
a second episode is downloaded and processed, retention has very often
already reclaimed the first one's file -- so the detector never gets two
episodes' audio to compare at once, and keeps discarding its only candidate
and restarting from whatever the newest download is. Cruising the Waves
reaching a real Tentative candidate the same day is consistent with this: a
show whose downloads happen to land further apart, or whose previous pending
episode hadn't been played+reclaimed yet, doesn't hit the race.

This was never a signal-processing problem -- DEFAULT_REFERENCE_SECONDS,
MIN_SCORE and CONFIRM_THRESHOLD were the wrong place to look the whole time.
Wrote up three options (exempt a pending episode from reclaim, extend the
grace period for a show still building its first candidate, or accept the
gap for fast shows) as a decision for Peter, not something to just change.

Separately unresolved and now secondary: Up First's actual second download
(2026-09-28) left zero trace in show_fingerprints, which the live test's
fallback path would have if it had run at all -- most likely a deferred or
dropped one-shot WorkManager job, not reproduced live this session.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Sj3CoWEedM56bebByKgNxA

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