ceremony/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

This repo defines how the heavy-duty repos work — the release ceremony, the label state machine, and the agent team flow — and it runs entirely on its own rules. If something here contradicts how this repo actually operates, one of the two is a bug.

The line

Work moves through one pipeline, and every stage has an owner:

discussion ──▶ triage ──▶ issue ──▶ build ──▶ review ──▶ human merge ──▶ release
 (anyone)     (agent)   (queue)    (agent)   (agents)     (human)      (ceremony)

• Discussions are where intent lives. Anyone — human or agent — who has an idea, a bug, a question, or a "we should…" opens a discussion, not an issue. Discussions are allowed to be vague; that is what they are for.
• Issues are minted only by triage. Nobody else writes issues — not humans, not builders, not reviewers. An issue is a work order with a quality bar (the issue contract in TRIAGE.md), and the bar holds because exactly one role is accountable for it. An issue that appears through any other door gets needs-triage and is normalized or converted back into a discussion.
• Builders turn one issue into one PR. BUILDER.md.
• Reviewers converge on a verdict. REVIEWER.md.
• Humans decide twice: in the discussion (what is worth doing, and any call triage escalates back) and at the merge (whether it ships). Everything between those two points is agent work by default.
• Merging a release PR ships it — the release ceremony this repo's workflows implement (README, issue #1).

Who may set which label is LABELS.md's contract.

The PR flow

The same flow the sibling repos run, and the part of this pipeline that is already proven:

1. One issue, one PR, opened as a draft while building, with Closes #N in the body. Drafts are invisible to the reviewer panel on purpose. Every behavior change adds one line to CHANGELOG.md under ## Unreleased (insert above the heading below — never type over it; the monotonic guard exists because of exactly that edit).
2. When it's ready: mark ready-for-review and request the whole panel.
3. Rounds are answered whole. Wait until every reviewer has a verdict in, then answer the entire round in a single reply, push the fixes, and re-request the reviewers that didn't approve. Prefer verification over argument: a test settles what a comment thread can't.
4. Reviews end in a verdict — approve or request-changes, never a bare comment. The verdict carries blockingness only; the body carries the feedback. (REVIEWER.md for why a comment-only review stalls the machine.)
5. Handoff: when the round passes — every panel verdict is an approval of the current head and no blocker:* label stands — the author posts the round summary, requests the human's review, and sets state:needs-human. The label write is optimistic; the reconciler validates it within seconds.
6. A human merges. Nothing else merges.

Roster

Five identities share the work (org team agents), each living in its own box — one box per credential, because the box is the blast-radius boundary; roles are what a session is told, and AGENTS.md routes from there:

identity	box (rig tenant)	standing work
dan-claude-bot	triage (claude-box)	triage — the only door issues come through; this identity mints issues and nothing else writes them (#18's triage-actors)
claude-bot-andresmgsl	claude-box	build (release-flow and guards machinery) + review
codex-bot-andresmgsl	codex-box	build (scaffolding, conversions) + review
grok-bot-andresmgsl	grok-box	review
kimi-bot-andresmgsl	kimi-box	review — builder trial on a small mechanical issue once its verdicts have a track record

The review panel for any PR is every bench identity except its author — recusal by construction, enforced by the reconciler (#10): the required verdicts are the panel minus the PR's author, so convergence always means three cross-vendor approvals of the current head. Builders and triage default to different models so the issue contract is honestly exercised — a spec gap should surface as a question on the issue, not be silently filled by shared priors. Humans (danmt) decide in discussions and merge; the roster is config, not doctrine — swapping a vendor is an edit to this table (and to panel= in .github/labels.conf once #10 lands), nothing more.

Each governed repo names its own roster in its CONTRIBUTING; this one is ceremony's.

Code conventions

• Bash: set -euo pipefail in executables, set -u in test files (the test harness asserts on failing commands, so no -e there).
• mawk-compatible awk — CI runners ship mawk, not gawk; no \x escapes.
• Every piece of logic is a file of its own so a test can drive it. Workflows and actions gather facts; scripts decide. If a decision lives inline in YAML, it is in the wrong place.
• Comments carry the why — the incident that bought the rule, with its issue number (box#108, rig#66, …). When porting from a sibling repo, the war stories come along; they are the documentation.
• Whole-version matching everywhere: 0.7.0 never matches 0.7.0-rc1.
• Shellcheck- and actionlint-clean is a CI gate, not a suggestion.

How the other repos use this

Two consumption modes, split by what has a runtime:

• Machinery is consumed by reference. Workflows and actions are fetched by GitHub at run time from the ref the caller pins — no copy exists in the consumer.
• Doctrine is consumed as a machine-verified mirror. A document's only "runtime" is an agent reading the working tree of the repo it stands in — a doc that requires a cross-repo fetch before it governs is a doc that sometimes goes unread. So the agent-facing set — AGENTS.md, TRIAGE.md, BUILDER.md, REVIEWER.md, LABELS.md — is vendored into each governed repo at .ceremony/, byte-identical to this repo at the pinned ref, by the sync tool (issue #19). A CI guard diffs the mirror against the pin on every PR: hand-editing a vendored file, or bumping the pin without re-syncing, goes red. It is a copy that cannot drift — which is the only kind of copy this org allows.

A governed repo (box, rig, cast, incubator, …) therefore carries:

• .ceremony/ — the vendored doctrine (machine-written; never edited by hand; agents read it from the checkout, no network, no other repo);
• a thin root AGENTS.md stub — a few lines: "governed by heavy-duty/ceremony; read .ceremony/AGENTS.md first; repo specifics in CONTRIBUTING". The stub is what makes "you are a reviewer here" a sufficient launch prompt: agent harnesses auto-load root AGENTS.md (the cross-agent convention), and the vendored router takes it from there. Tool-specific files (CLAUDE.md, …) reduce to one pointer line at it;
• the thin workflow callers (release, labels) pinned to a ceremony tag, plus the docs-sync --check guard step in CI;
• a short header in its own CONTRIBUTING pointing agents at .ceremony/, followed by only what is genuinely per-repo:
  • the review panel roster,
  • the scope:* label set (.github/labels.conf + .github/labeler.yml),
  • the drill meaning (drills/README.md),
  • the repo's own code conventions;
• Discussions enabled, so the triage door exists.

One pin governs both the machinery and the doctrine: the ref a repo's workflows call is the ref its .ceremony/ mirror is verified against. Bumping the pin is one PR — the pin line plus the re-synced mirror, checked by the same guard — and is how a process change rolls out: deliberately, per repo, reviewed. The full adoption checklist lives in docs/CONSUMERS.md (issue #12).