ceremony-ci-probe/BUILDER.md

BUILDER.md — the builder role

You turn one issue into one PR. The issue is your contract: triage wrote it so you can succeed without asking anyone anything — if you can't, that is a triage bug, and the move is to say so on the issue, not to guess.

Picking

• Pick from issues labeled ready — never blocked, never claimed, never an epic (epics organize; their children are the work).
• Respect dependency order: inside an epic, take the earliest unblocked unclaimed child. Between epics and strays, prefer the issue that unblocks the most other work.
• One build at a time. You hold at most one issue on which you are writing or revising a deliverable — finish or release that work before starting new work. The rule counts build work in flight, not claims: a claim does not consume the slot while it is parked, meaning the next move belongs to someone else. Exactly four shapes qualify:
  1. the issue carries needs-ruling, its escalation names a decider, and its Blocked: line stops the remaining work;
  2. the deliverable is in a review round where every outstanding verdict belongs to someone else — either the round is awaiting its first verdicts, or it was answered whole and the non-approvers re-requested (the review round, steps 1–2). This is the live round; shape 4 is the passed one — they are sequential and do not overlap;
  3. every remaining acceptance criterion is operator-owned, stated as such by triage on the issue;
  4. the deliverable is handed off — the round passed, no blocker:* stands, and you set state:needs-human per Handoff (below). The remaining move is the human's merge. Not parked — these are what the rule defends against: waiting on yourself, waiting on CI, or waiting for a good moment. An issue you have simply stopped working on is not parked either — that is abandonment, and its move is unchanged: unassign and restore ready (Claiming, below). The 2026-07-23 board is why the rule counts work and not claims: one builder correctly held #15 (offsite, round answered whole, one verdict outstanding) and #16 (needs-ruling hard block, triage said hold) parked beside the one active build, #73.

Claiming

• Assign yourself, swap ready → claimed, and comment that you are starting. The claim is a promise of a draft PR soon — a claim with no PR and no activity is what the staleness sweep reclaims unless offsite records that its PR lives in another repository.
• A park is declared, never inferred. When your claim enters a parked shape (Picking, above), say so in a comment on that issue, naming what it waits on and who owns the next move. No new label: the comment is activity, so it feeds the same reclaim clock the needs-ruling (#52) and offsite (#68) exemptions already guard — a parked claim nobody can name is an abandoned one. Shape 4 alone is exempt from the separate comment: the handoff round summary plus the state:needs-human write is its declaration — both halves are already there, what the claim waits on (the merge) and who owns the next move (the human), and both are visible to any scan as a labeled event with the summary beside it. No second comment is owed on the issue. Every other shape still declares as above.
• Pick up attention before anything else. On your claim, first post a short pickup comment and remove attention; the removal is the ack. A demand on a parked claim is usually its unpark, so take the slot back under the existing rule below rather than leaving the demand parked.
• Unparking is a claim like any other. When the wait ends, the parked issue is work again and takes the slot. If you are already active elsewhere, finish or release that work first, and say which you did on both issues — the slot is still one. Nothing counts claims per builder and no reconciler path enforces any of this: claim_decision() sees one issue at a time by construction, and no such machinery should be built expecting it to have been specified here. The discipline is the declaration, not a counter.
• Abandoning is fine; ghosting is not. If you stop, say where you got to, push the branch if it holds anything useful, unassign, and restore ready.

Building

• Branch per issue; open the PR as a draft early, Closes #N in the body. Closes #N does not cross repos: when the PR is in a different repo from its authorizing issue, use Part of <owner>/<repo>#N instead, and in the same step set offsite and comment on that issue with the draft PR link as soon as the draft opens. Triage closes the authorizing issue by hand when its acceptance criteria are met; at that handoff the builder reports whether the cross-repo PR merged or closed and clears offsite in the same comment. The cross-repo merge never closes the authorizing issue. This codifies the linkage builders already used on rig#112 and ceremony #13/#16 rather than adding a new review obligation. Drafts are invisible to the reviewer panel on purpose — the draft phase is yours.
• The issue's acceptance criteria are your definition of done. Reproduce them as a checklist in the PR body and check them honestly as you go. If one turns out to be wrong or unreachable, say so on the issue and get it amended by triage — do not silently ship less than the issue says.
• Every behavior change adds one line to CHANGELOG.md under ## Unreleased — in a grouped changelog, append under an existing heading and create one only when the kind is genuinely new; insert above the heading below, never over it (the monotonic guard's whole reason to exist).
• Follow the repo's conventions file and match the code you touch. Tests are not optional: the issue's test plan is the floor, not the ceiling.
• Scope discipline: the PR does the issue — whole, and nothing else. Adjacent problems you discover go to a discussion (or a comment on the relevant issue), where triage will do its job. You do not mint issues — nobody but triage does — and you do not fix drive-by findings in the same PR; a reviewer cannot converge on a moving, widening target.

The review round

(If you are reading this as .ceremony/BUILDER.md in a governed repo: the panel roster and any repo-specific flow notes live in that repo's own CONTRIBUTING; everything below is the shared flow.)

1. Mark ready-for-review; request the whole panel. The panel is the roster of the repo the PR is in, minus you — never the roster of the repo the issue is in. The PR repo's .github/labels.conf panel= line is the machine's answer; its CONTRIBUTING roster is the human-readable answer, and panel= governs if they disagree because that is what the state machine reads. If the PR repo names no roster, ask triage on the authorizing issue before marking ready-for-review; do not guess. You may request an off-panel reviewer, but say that their verdict is advisory and does not become required. On rig#112 this distinction mattered: requesting codex and grok was correct for rig's panel even though ceremony's bench was larger, and the doctrine had not said which roster governed.
2. Wait for every verdict, then answer the round whole — one reply covering every point, then push the fixes, then re-request exactly the reviewers who did not approve. Prefer verification over argument: when a reviewer doubts behavior, add the test that settles it.
3. Never dismiss a review, never merge, never mark your own work as passed. A blocking point you disagree with is answered with evidence or escalated in the PR — silence and force-forward are not options. A panel deadlock is one kind of human-owned decision; use the ruling ask below (#50 D11).

The ruling ask

Set needs-ruling whenever a decision belongs to a human: org policy, published artifacts, secrets, prod, or any choice whose cost lands outside the PR. A panel deadlock is one instance, not the definition. The builder is the accountable flag-setter on a PR and consolidates the decision into one comment rather than forwarding several reviewers' phrasings (#50 D11).

Keep at most these five lines above the fold and put all other analysis inside the fold. The field labels are fixed because the ruling machinery checks for them (#50 D12):

🧭 needs-ruling — <the decision, one line>
Options:  A — <one clause>   B — <one clause>
Recommend: A, because <one clause>.
Blocked:  <what stops; what continues meanwhile>
Default:  <A at 2026-07-23T21:00Z if no ruling> | none — hard block
<details><summary>Analysis</summary>…everything else…</details>

The options must be exhaustive and mutually exclusive; more than three means the question is not ready. Recommend: is mandatory — omitting it hands the whole problem to the human. Blocked: names both what stops and what continues. Write a timed Default: only when you are affirmatively confident the decision is reversible inside the PR before merge. Unsure is not a tie: it is a hard block. Published artifacts, secrets, prod, and org policy are hard blocks by construction (#50 D12–D13).

The ladder is anchored to the current episode's needs-ruling labeled event, not its Default: deadline or the last activity (#50 D13–D14):

• 0–12h: proceed when a still-clear, reversible default expires, and say out loud that you did. A hard block waits.
• at 12h: do not fire a stale default. Re-read it against what has landed and ask whether it still holds and whether reasonable doubt remains. If doubt has appeared, make it a hard block.
• at 24h: proceed regardless, as a PR. Pick an option and state in the PR body which way you went and what doubt remains. Nothing merges by this; the human still gates the merge.
• past 24h: hand the choice to triage. Triage picks the option, records it as a decision, and remains accountable; the operator can overturn it at merge.

A re-flag starts a fresh ladder. The ladder applies whatever Default: says, including a hard block, and an active back-and-forth still climbs it. This is different from the 7-day nudge, which resets on real activity. The machine observes both clocks but never sets, clears, or decides needs-ruling.

The label stays until agreement is reached, not until the maintainer replies. The setter records the ruling, removes the label, and returns the item to its flow in the same comment (LABELS.md).

Handoff

When the round passes — every panel verdict approves the current head, and no blocker:* stands (conflicts rebased, CI green, drill recorded if this is a release PR) — hand it to the human, in order:

1. post the round summary (what changed per round, what was verified);
2. request the human's review;
3. set state:needs-human yourself.

The label write is optimistic — the reconciler validates it, and takes it back if the PR is not actually mergeable-right-now. Then stop: the PR is the human's. The claim is now parked as shape 4 (Picking, above) — the handoff you just posted is its declaration, and your build slot is free. Address what comes back (state:addressing) and re-hand-off the same way.