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>
The who-sets-what table is the day-to-day answer to "can I move this by
hand", and it never mentioned blocker:* -- a whole machine-owned family
added when state:needs-rebase was retired. merge-next was missing too, and
that is the one label whose ownership actually needs saying, because it is
the only one in the machine's vocabulary the machine deliberately does not
set.
Step 6 also read as though requesting the maintainer is sufficient to flip
state:needs-human. It is not: needs-human requires zero blockers, so the
request does nothing on a conflicted or red PR.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
changelog-armed.sh asks only whether the TOP section agrees with VERSION.
A PR that replaces '## X.Y.Z — DATE' with its own '## Unreleased' block —
git merges the edit cleanly, and a shipped section is silently absorbed into
Unreleased. The damage only surfaces at the next release, when
release-notes.sh cannot find the section it extracts by heading.
Add changelog-monotonic.sh: the set of '^## X.Y.Z' headings on a branch must
be a superset of the set at the merge base. Release headings are append-only,
so the rule has no legitimate violation — and the ceremony's stamp passes by
construction, adding X.Y.Z and removing none.
Its own script, not a clause in changelog-armed.sh: the input is a git
history rather than two files, no base ref is a SKIP rather than a failure,
and changelog-armed.sh is driven by test/release.sh against constructed
non-git trees that cannot express the failure at all.
CI checks out with fetch-depth: 0 and sets CHANGELOG_MONOTONIC_STRICT=1, so
an unreachable base ref goes red there instead of degrading to the skip a
local run is allowed.
Closes#122
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stamping '## Unreleased' away left main with no heading for a PR
authored before the release to land in, so its entry merged cleanly
into the section that just shipped. The ceremony now re-arms, and
changelog-armed.sh enforces it keyed on VERSION -- so the ceremony
PR's own bare-VERSION tree stays legal (rig#44 / cast#108).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The permission-starvation blocker found on the cast twin (claude-bot,
cast#112 round 4) is identical here: a declared permissions: block zeroes
every unspecified scope, so the decide step's label read and the bump
fallback's gh pr create could only 403 — every genuine ceremony would end
red at the label check. pull-requests: write added with the consumers
named. CONTRIBUTING step 3 and the changelog entry now tell the shipped
story: push-to-main door, event.before interlock, self-re-arm with the
manual path's bump staying the operator's. Re-runs wording nit taken.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The 0.7.0 ceremony exposed the gap: the release PR merged with four
approvals and nothing happened, correctly, because publishing hung off a
separate, manual, silent-when-forgotten tag push — the worst failure
shape, no error and no red X. The ship decision already lives in the
release PR, so the merge now IS the release.
release.yml grows a second door: pull_request closed on main, gated on
merged == true AND the hand-set release label (read from the event
payload — no extra permission). Four asserts, in order, each fail-loud
and creating nothing: VERSION at the merge commit is non--dev; VERSION
changed in this PR (merge vs first parent — the -dev interlock that
kills a mislabeled ordinary PR); the version's CHANGELOG.md section
extracts non-empty via the existing release-notes.sh; and no tag or
release exists yet. Then, in the same job, it creates the tag ref at
the merge commit via the API and publishes with gh release create
--verify-tag. Same-job on purpose: a GITHUB_TOKEN-created tag triggers
no workflows (GitHub's anti-recursion), so the tag door can never fire
off it and double-publish, and the no-existing assert covers a manual
tag racing the merge. The tag-push path stays step-for-step identical
as the documented manual fallback and backfill, gated to the push event
so a closed PR never runs it against a branch ref.
CONTRIBUTING.md's Releases section now reads "the maintainer's merge IS
the release", with the manual tag ritual kept as the fallback.
test/release.sh grep-pins the merged+labeled gate, all four asserts,
the same-job tag+publish, and that the tag-push trigger survives — in
the same daemon-free, fail-closed style.
Fixes#96
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
README: the installer's default is the latest release — reproducible,
resolved off the releases/latest redirect, failing loudly rather than
silently handing out main — with the pinned (BOX_REF=<tag>) and dev
(BOX_REF=main) channels beside it. CONTRIBUTING: a release is a PR,
then a tag — the release PR bumps VERSION and stamps the changelog,
the bare X.Y.Z tag on the merge commit triggers release.yml, and
main's VERSION bumps to X.Y.(Z+1)-dev immediately after, because the
versioned layout names install trees after VERSION. Plus the
CHANGELOG entry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <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>
Round-1 blockers, all three reviewers concurring:
- COMMENTED agreement now counts: agreement_signal recognizes the live bots'
durable markers (Verdict: Approve / I agree with everything / leading ✅) —
the gate to needs-human can actually close. Formal verdicts remain the
contract (CONTRIBUTING), this is the documented transitional workaround.
- Every counting verdict is bound to the head SHA; a stale approval parks the
PR in addressing (agent owes re-request) instead of promoting unreviewed
code. CHANGES_REQUESTED blocks at any head, per GitHub's own semantic.
- reconcile serializes under ONE job-level concurrency group; scope stays
per-PR. No more cron-vs-event race on the request-the-human-once guard.
- Sweep resilience: per-PR subshell (one failure logs and continues), label
edits warn instead of wedging; the self-heal claim now matches reality
(dispatch-only bootstrap).
- The state machine is extracted pure (globals in, state out) and sourceable:
test/labels-reconcile.sh proves 14 fixture transitions — comment-only
agreement, stale approval, comment-without-verdict, human precedence and
human-block — wired into CI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Maintainer rule: a comment-only review is a non-verdict the state machine
(and the board) cannot read. Verdict carries blockingness only; nits ride an
approval, blockers — including verdict-gating questions — are request-changes.
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>
