box/CONTRIBUTING.md
dan-claude-bot 08d099cce2 fix: verdict contract, head-bound approvals, serialized reconcile — and a testable state machine
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>
2026-07-18 19:31:00 +00:00

3.6 KiB

Contributing

How change lands in this repo. The short version: PRs are born as drafts, three reviewer bots take the first rounds, a human takes the last word — and labels tell you where everything is without opening anything.

The PR loop

  1. Fork and branch. Contributors work from forks; upstream branches are for maintainers. Title the PR conventionally (feat:, fix:, docs:), and include a CHANGELOG.md entry under ## Unreleased when the change deserves one.
  2. Open as a draft while you build. Drafts are invisible to the reviewer bots on purpose.
  3. When it's ready: mark ready-for-review and request all three bots — claude-bot-andresmgsl, codex-bot-andresmgsl, grok-bot-andresmgsl. They poll roughly every 15 minutes.
  4. Rounds are answered whole. Wait until all three have reviewed, then answer the entire round in a single reply, push the fixes, and re-request the bots that didn't approve. Prefer verification over argument: a test settles what a comment thread can't.
  5. Reviews end in a verdict. A reviewer — bot or human — either approves or requests changes, never a bare comment. A comment-only review is a non-verdict: it doesn't say whether the round passed, and the state machine (and anyone scanning the board) has to guess. The verdict carries blockingness only, the body carries the feedback: non-blocking nits ride an approval and the author addresses them at their discretion; anything blocking — including a question that gates the verdict — is request changes, saying what unblocks it. The reconciler treats a comment-only review as not-approved, so commenting without a verdict only stalls the PR. (Transitional workaround: until every bot speaks the formal contract, the reconciler counts a COMMENTED review whose body carries a durable agreement signal — "Verdict: Approve", "I agree with everything", a leading — as an approval, bound to the current head SHA.)
  6. When all three approve, the final review goes to the maintainer — the labels workflow requests it automatically.
  7. Checks must be green: shellcheck and bash test/cli.sh locally mirror what CI runs; the multi-user rehearsal runs in CI on a real Incus.

Labels — who sets what

The full taxonomy lives in LABELS.md. What matters day to day is who sets each kind — most of it is machinery, and hand-moving a machine-owned label just gets corrected on the next pass:

Labels Set by
state:* the labels workflow (.github/workflows/labels.yml) — recomputed from GitHub's own facts every 15 minutes and on PR events. Never by hand.
stale the same workflow — 48h without commits, comments, or reviews. blocked PRs are exempt: they are quiet legitimately.
scope:* on PRs actions/labeler, from the changed paths (.github/labeler.yml). Additive — you may add more, the machine won't remove them.
scope:* on issues you, when opening or triaging — issues have no paths to derive from.
blocked, release you — automation never guesses intent.
bug / enhancement / documentation you, on issues only — a PR's type already lives in its title.

Issues

Give issues the same care as PR titles: say the surface in the title, apply a scope: label and a type label (bug / enhancement / documentation) when you open one, and blocked when it waits on something — that is what keeps the board navigable as the issue count grows.