Drill records move from sections inside drill/RUNS.md to one file per
version at drills/<version>.md.
The old guard had to parse headings: an em-dash prefix match, an optional
" — DATE" tail, a whole-version comparison so 0.3.0-rc1 could not satisfy
0.3.0, and a separate non-blank-body rule. All of it existed only because
records shared one file, and both sibling repos shipped a defect out of
that complexity in review — a `sed '/./,$!d'` extractor where `.` matches
a space (box#149, cast#138), and heading-grammar drift. One file per
version makes nearly all of it unrepresentable: 0.3.0.md and 0.3.0-rc1.md
are different files, and the filesystem does the whole-version comparison.
The awk drill_section() machinery is gone. What survives is the one rule
splitting the files does not make unrepresentable: a file of only
whitespace is not a record.
Plain drills/, NOT .drills/ — a dot-directory is invisible to globs
without dotglob, the cause of #70 here and box#116/box#118.
drill/RUNS.md is deleted; it was created in this same unmerged PR, held no
real records, and its useful reasoning moves to drills/README.md. (box
keeps ITS drill/RUNS.md — that one is a genuine harness log.)
Also corrects the ordering framing in CONTRIBUTING and the new README: the
three repos' drills are INDEPENDENT, run in any order. What makes that safe
is that each pins the same fixed set of candidate refs, so box and rig
measure the same pair — that, not sequencing, is what dissolves the mutual
recursion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CONTRIBUTING has always required a real-hardware drill on a release, and
nothing enforced it — so no release in this family has ever carried one.
Every other ceremony step is checked by a script; the one that costs an
afternoon was checked by a reviewer remembering. A reviewer bot finally
blocked on it.
- drill/RUNS.md: rig's own run log, starting EMPTY of records. rig has no
drill harness of its own yet; the harness lives in box's drill/ and this
file is the record, not the instrument.
- .github/scripts/drill-recorded.sh: a -dev tree asserts nothing; a bare
VERSION requires a non-empty '## Release drill — X.Y.Z' section, version
matched WHOLE so an -rc1 record is not evidence for the final.
- Per-repo on purpose. A cross-repo lookup into box fails on a token, a fork
checkout or a network blip, and all of those degrade to 'pass' on precisely
the tree that ships — the UNREADABLE-vs-NONE shape #90 fixed.
- It asks for a RECORD, not a RESULT, so a maintainer waiver stays possible
but has to be written down under that version.
- Fixtures carry their own VERSION and RUNS.md (heavy-duty/box#146: fixtures
reading the repo's real VERSION exercised only the -dev branch and went red
first while cutting a release).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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 — both raised 1 and 2).
1. `gh issue edit --add-label` rejects the WHOLE call on one unknown
label name, and the blocker:* labels are created only by the
dispatch-only bootstrap. So the first sweep after this lands would
have converged NOTHING on exactly the PRs this change exists to heal,
surfacing only as a WARNING in a cron log. Batching state and blockers
into one edit for anti-flicker is what widened that blast radius.
Every label about to be ADDED is now filtered against the repo's real
label set, read once per sweep; removals need no filter because they
are built from has_label. An unreadable label set does not filter, so
a failed read cannot silently strip the board.
2. blocker:unrequested fired only on MISSING, so a round whose approvals
all staled behind a push — with nothing re-requested — carried no
blocker at all, though the agent owes exactly the same ask. Now
MISSING or STALE: both mean this head has no verdict from that
reviewer.
3. LABELS.md: restore the substantive "Leaves when" text for
state:addressing, and widen the blocker:unrequested row to name both
shapes now that (2) changes what the label means.
Fixtures 66 -> 68.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Retires `state:needs-rebase` in favour of two independent axes: `state:*`
(whose ball, exactly one) and `blocker:*` (what is in the way, additive).
One rule joins them: `state:needs-human` requires zero blockers.
The single-label design projected independent facts — mergeability, check
status, review round — onto one totally-ordered value, so one always won
and the rest vanished. Every precedence bug this machine has had lived on
that ordering. Blockers are a set, so there is no precedence between them
to get wrong.
`state:bots-reviewing` tightens to mean strictly "a request is live"; a
ready PR nobody was asked to review is now `state:addressing` +
`blocker:unrequested`. The reconciler strips the retired
`state:needs-rebase` on sight via a RETIRED array.
Also wires test/labels-reconcile.sh into CI, where it had never run.
Fixtures 51 -> 64.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 2 review found two ways the "a human could merge this right now"
invariant still leaked, both of which let state:needs-human land on a PR
the button would refuse.
The check-rollup classifier enumerated the outcomes that block and
defaulted the rest to SUCCESS, so ERROR, CANCELLED and STALE fell through
into green. Inverted to an allow-list of the outcomes that DON'T block
(SUCCESS, NEUTRAL, SKIPPED, plus the pending set); everything else,
including an outcome neither enum has today, blocks. The rollup mixes
CheckRun.conclusion with StatusContext.state and an outcome the list
forgets is one we cannot certify as mergeable — a false FAILURE parks the
PR on the agent, a false SUCCESS invites a bad merge. The classifier also
moved out of main() into checks_state(), which is why no fixture caught
this: it was inline in the fetch loop and the jq itself was untestable.
Once CANCELLED blocks, superseded runs must be dropped first — a re-run
does not evict the run it replaced, and judging every entry would strand
every re-run PR in needs-rebase. Each context now collapses to its newest
entry, keyed on workflow + job name because a bare job name is only
unique within its workflow.
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 with nothing bound to the
head. The whole round is now collected before any precedence is applied,
STALE ahead of MISSING. The MISSING-yields-to-an-explicit-human-request
rule is untouched.
Fixtures 29 -> 44, pinning the whole check-outcome enum, the supersede
rule in both orders, and the mixed round at both ends of BOTS.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ported from heavy-duty/box#137 (heavy-duty/box#136) so the three repos'
reconcilers stay byte-identical. The state machine here was byte-identical to
box's before this change, and remains so after -- only the scope:* taxonomy
differs, correctly.
decide_state() derived state from three inputs -- draft flag, requested
reviewers, submitted reviews -- and read NOTHING about mergeability or checks.
With the `if requested "$HUMAN"` short-circuit at the top of its precedence,
the label was sticky: once the maintainer was requested, a PR read
state:needs-human through conflicts, through red CI, through a force-push that
staled every approval.
This repo paid for it directly. During the ten-PR batch merged today, every
merge re-conflicted the PRs below it through CHANGELOG.md, and each kept its
state:needs-human label throughout -- inviting merges that could not happen.
It was caught only by opening them one at a time, which is the work the label
exists to save.
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 -- MISSING
(nobody has reviewed yet) is a different fact from STALE (everyone reviewed
something else). UNKNOWN mergeability is NOT treated as unmergeable: GitHub
reports it for about a minute after every merge, and flapping every open PR
through needs-rebase on each merge would be worse than the bug. A failed read
degrades to the same "do not know" value.
Also adds merge-next: queue order is intent, so the reconciler never sets it,
only CLEARS it once the PR stops being mergeable-by-a-human.
Fixtures 19 -> 29, including that UNKNOWN does not trigger needs-rebase and a
draft outranks a conflict. No live dry-run evidence here -- this repo has no
open PRs right now -- so the fixtures and box's live dry-run are the proof.
Closes#87
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The trait was named for who lives on a box; what it decides is whether
root SSH stays open as the control plane's automation door. Those are
different questions, and `dev-server` proved it: an unattended VM-host
appliance nobody lives on, correctly class=human because its root door
must close. After #76 gave `-server` the job of naming the machine
family, that box carried a suffix saying server and a trait saying
human. `dev-server --root-door closed` says what is true, once.
Unlike #76's role rename this field is read back on live machines, so
the compat read is mandatory rather than courteous: one resolver,
root_door_of, reads both vocabularies and every consumer goes through
it — close-root's gate, apply's note, and bootstrap-tenant's
machine-marker guard, which used the presence of `class=` as its "is
this a real fleet machine?" test and would otherwise have let a tenant
converge clobber a live box. New markers are written as `root-door=`
only. Markers carrying both fields in disagreement, or neither, fail
closed with a re-run-bootstrap repair.
Fixture markers are kept deliberately at the retired spelling (the
convention #76's pre-rename-cp fixture established) and pinned at both
consumers; deleting the compat arm turns ten checks red.
Closes#77
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, rig'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>
