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>
