A review landing was never a trigger for the labels workflow, so the exact
moment `state:needs-human` became true — the third bot approving — fired
nothing, and the label waited on the `*/15` cron. That cron does not run at
its declared rate: measured across box, rig and cast over a two-hour window
on 2026-07-20, one scheduled run each against the eight `*/15` implies.
The obvious fix does not work. There is no `pull_request_review_target`, and
on fork PRs — all of them here — `pull_request_review` runs with a read-only
token and cannot label anything.
So the handoff wakes the sweep itself:
- `pull_request_target` also fires on `labeled`/`unlabeled`
- the author sets `state:needs-human` at handoff, as the third act after the
round summary and the review request
The author's own label write fires the sweep that validates it — an
optimistic write, not a transfer of ownership. The reconciler confirms or
corrects it seconds later, and the cron falls back to a last resort. It
cannot loop: the reconciler writes with GITHUB_TOKEN, which does not create
workflow runs; agent writes use a PAT, which does.
`labels-reconcile.sh` is unchanged — it already recomputes every open PR
from scratch on every run, which is what makes the optimistic write safe.
The `scope` job is skipped on label events, where no path can have changed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 1 review (claude-bot, codex-bot on #138 and the sibling PRs).
gh issue edit rejects the WHOLE call on one unknown label name, and this
change made state and blockers share a single edit for anti-flicker. On a repo
whose taxonomy predates the blocker:* labels -- every repo, at merge -- the
first sweep would therefore converge NOTHING on exactly the PRs the change
exists to fix, surfacing only as a warning in a cron log. Adds are now
filtered against the repo's real label set, read once per sweep. Removals need
no filter: they are built from has_label, so they provably exist. An
unreadable label set does not filter, because a failed read must not silently
strip the board.
blocker:unrequested also missed the stale round. MISSING and STALE are both
verdicts this head does not have -- nobody reviewed it, or everybody reviewed
something else -- and the agent owes an ask either way. The stale one is the
worse of the two: it has approvals on the page that no longer describe the
tree, which is the case LABELS.md already called the most dangerous.
Fixtures 66 -> 68.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Retires state:needs-rebase. Mergeability, check status and the review round
are independent facts; forcing them through one totally-ordered label meant
one always won and the rest vanished, which is where every precedence bug in
this machine has lived. needs-rebase was the clearest casualty -- it fired on
both a conflict and a failing check, which need opposite work.
Blockers are a set, so there is no ordering between them to get wrong. The
ordered axis is now purely about reviews. bots-reviewing also tightens to mean
a request is actually live; a PR nobody was asked to review is the agent's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 2. Two blockers, both real, both closing the same hole this PR
exists to close — a `state:needs-human` that invites a human to merge a
tree that will not merge.
The check-rollup classifier enumerated the outcomes that block and let
the rest fall into `else "SUCCESS"`, so ERROR, CANCELLED and STALE all
read as green. Inverted: it now lists the outcomes that DON'T block —
SUCCESS, NEUTRAL, SKIPPED, plus the pending set — and treats everything
else as blocking. The direction is the point. The rollup mixes two
closed enums (CheckRun.conclusion, StatusContext.state) and an outcome
the list forgets is one we cannot certify as mergeable; the costs are
not symmetric, since a false FAILURE parks the PR on the agent who
looks, while a false SUCCESS is #136 exactly.
Once CANCELLED blocks, superseded runs must be dropped first: a re-run
does not evict the run it replaced, and this PR's own tip carries a
CANCELLED `scope` beside the SUCCESS `scope` that superseded it. Each
context now collapses to its newest entry before anything is judged,
keyed on workflow + job name because a bare job name is only unique
within its workflow. That preserves the re-run case the panel split
over while still blocking a cancelled run that is the newest word.
The classifier also moved out of main() into checks_state(). That is
why no fixture caught this: it was inline in the fetch loop, so the
fixtures could only inject CHECKS= as an already-decided string.
Second, decide_state() returned from inside the bot loop on the first
MISSING, so a STALE belonging to a later bot in BOTS was never read —
a round that was both unfinished and staled came out needs-human over
a head nobody had reviewed. The whole round is now collected before
precedence is applied to it as a unit, STALE before MISSING.
test/labels-reconcile.sh: 29 -> 44 fixtures, pinning the check-outcome
enum, the supersede rule (both orders, plus same name in another
workflow), and the mixed round at both ends of BOTS. All verified
non-vacuous against the round-1 code.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
decide_state() derived state from three inputs -- draft flag, requested
reviewers, submitted reviews -- and read NOTHING about mergeability or checks.
Combined with the `if requested "$HUMAN"` short-circuit at the top of its
precedence, the label was sticky: once the maintainer was requested, the PR
read state:needs-human through conflicts, through red CI, through a
force-push that staled every approval. Nothing demoted it.
Observed twice in one afternoon, in two different shapes. Three PRs sat at
state:needs-human while CONFLICTING for hours -- the board inviting a merge
GitHub had already disabled. And #119, after a rebase, read MERGEABLE, four
green checks, state:needs-human, with ZERO reviews bound to its head: every
visible signal saying "merge me" over a tree no reviewer had seen. That second
shape is the dangerous one, because unlike a conflict nothing on the page
contradicts it.
The rule the label now keeps: state:needs-human means a human could merge this
RIGHT NOW, so anything making that false outranks the request that put it
there.
CONFLICTING or failing checks -> state:needs-rebase (new; the agent's to fix)
approvals staled by a push -> state:addressing (nobody reviewed this tree)
An UNFINISHED round still yields to an explicit human request -- a maintainer
pulling a PR to themselves early is deliberate, and MISSING (nobody has
reviewed yet) is a different fact from STALE (everyone reviewed something
else). That distinction is why the two are handled in different arms rather
than collapsed.
UNKNOWN mergeability is deliberately NOT treated as unmergeable: GitHub
reports it for about a minute after every merge while it recomputes, and
flapping every open PR through needs-rebase on each merge would be worse than
the bug being fixed. A failed read of either fact degrades to the same "do not
know" value, for the same reason -- an API hiccup must not relabel the board.
Also adds merge-next, because a correct needs-human still does not say WHICH
PR to merge first, and order matters when they conflict through CHANGELOG.md.
Queue order is intent, so the reconciler never sets it; it only CLEARS it the
moment the PR stops being mergeable-by-a-human -- precisely the staleness that
made needs-human untrustworthy.
Both live shapes are pinned in test/labels-reconcile.sh (19 -> 29 fixtures),
including that UNKNOWN does not trigger needs-rebase and that a draft outranks
a conflict. Proven non-vacuous: dropping the mergeability arm fails 4
assertions, dropping the STALE precedence fails 2, restoring returns 29/0.
Closes#136
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Maintainer direction: body-parsing agreement was a guess, and the machine
must not guess. COMMENTED is now unconditionally a non-verdict; the judgment
that a comment-only reviewer's round passed belongs to the PR AUTHOR, who
escalates by requesting the human's review — an explicit request is a fact,
and it is the machine's top-precedence input. Auto-request survives only for
the no-judgment case: three formal head-current approvals. CONTRIBUTING and
LABELS.md state the handoff; fixtures updated (14 transitions, including
author-escalation and the three-formal-approvals path).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The machinery LABELS.md promised. labels.yml runs the reconciler on a
15-minute cron plus PR events (pull_request_target — every PR here is from a
fork, where pull_request gets a read-only token; no PR code is ever checked
out). The script derives each open PR's state:* from GitHub's own facts and
converges labels statelessly; stale is judged from real activity (commits,
comments, reviews), never label churn, so the sweep cannot un-stale its own
mark. actions/labeler applies scope:* from changed paths. CONTRIBUTING.md is
the guideline: the PR loop, and who sets which labels. Rehearsed with
DRY_RUN=1 against the live repo; shellcheck-clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All three bot reviewers flagged it: gh label delete is not an upsert, so a
second run of the safe-to-run block errored on the trim lines. Loop + '|| true'.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Documents the shared heavy-duty label design at the root: state labels
that answer 'who is the ball with' across the bot-review loop, sweep-managed
stale + blocked, box's scope set, and the bootstrap block. State labels are
automation-owned; the reconciler workflow is a follow-up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
