box/LABELS.md

Labels

How this repo uses GitHub labels. The taxonomy is shared across the heavy-duty repos (box, rig, cast) — only the scope: set differs per repo, because it names this repo's actual surfaces.

State — who is the ball with? (PRs, exactly one)

Every open PR carries exactly one state: label, and it answers the only question a board scan actually asks: who is this PR waiting on? The states mirror the review loop this repo runs — PRs open as drafts, three reviewer bots pick up ready PRs with reviews requested, each round is answered in a single reply, and a human takes the final review.

Label	Color	Waiting on	Enters when	Leaves when
state:building	#FBCA04	the coding agent, still building	PR opened as draft	marked ready + bot reviews requested
state:bots-reviewing	#1D76DB	the reviewer bots to finish the round	ready with reviews requested, or fixes pushed and reviews re-requested	all three bots have reviewed the round
state:addressing	#D93F0B	the coding agent to reply, fix, or ask	all bots reviewed and not all approved; or nobody was asked; or a blocker is up	the round-reply is posted and fixes pushed — and any blocker named alongside is cleared
state:needs-human	#8250DF	the human reviewer	the PR could be merged right now: no blockers, three formal head-current approvals — and the human review is requested	merged — or changes requested, which cycles back to state:addressing

bots-reviewing and addressing are deliberately distinct: staleness in the first means poke the bots, staleness in the second means the agent dropped the ball. Collapsing them loses exactly the information a sweep needs. bots-reviewing therefore means strictly a request is live and an answer is coming — a PR nobody was asked to review is the agent's ball, not the bots'.

The second axis: blocker:*

State answers whose ball is it. Blockers answer what is in the way, and unlike states they are facts about the branch — mutually independent, so a PR carries as many as apply.

Label	Color	Means	Clears when
blocker:conflict	#B60205	GitHub says CONFLICTING — the agent owes a rebase	it merges cleanly
blocker:ci-red	#B60205	a check failed — the agent owes a fix, which a rebase will not provide	checks are green
blocker:unrequested	#E99695	this head has no verdict from somebody — never reviewed, or staled by a push — and nobody was asked for one	reviews are requested
blocker:drill-pending	#B60205	a release PR whose version has no drill record at drills/X.Y.Z.md — the ceremony is correct but unevidenced	the drill is run and recorded (or a waiver is recorded) at drills/X.Y.Z.md

blocker:drill-pending is the one blocker that says the diff is fine. The version is stamped, the changelog is right, CI's other guards are green — what is missing is the evidence that the release was proven on real hardware, which .github/scripts/drill-recorded.sh refuses to let a release ship without (CONTRIBUTING.md, "Releases"). Naming it separately from blocker:ci-red matters because the two owe different work: a red check is a fix in the branch, a pending drill is an hour on a real host.

It must be created by a maintainer account — the bot account gets a 403 creating labels, so the labels workflow's bootstrap dispatch cannot mint it. Until it exists in the repo, blocked stands in: it is the closest true thing (the PR is waiting on something outside itself) and, usefully, the staleness sweep already skips it, so a release parked overnight on a drill does not collect a stale.

One rule joins the axes: state:needs-human requires zero blockers. Any blocker means the work is the agent's, whatever the review round says.

This split exists because the single-label version kept lying. Independent facts were projected onto one totally-ordered label, so one always had to win and the losers vanished off the board: a PR that was both conflicted and red could only say one of them, and needs-rebase told an agent to rebase when what it actually owed was a bug fix. Precedence between two blockers is not a question a set has to answer, which is why every ordering bug this machine has had — needs-human surviving a conflict, MISSING swallowing STALE — lived on the axis that had to be totally ordered.

state:needs-rebase was the first attempt at this and is retired; the reconciler strips it on sight so no PR is left carrying a label nothing recomputes.

state:needs-human means one thing: a human could merge this right now. The label is the only signal a maintainer scanning the board (or a phone) actually reads, and one that says "your turn" on an unmergeable PR is worse than no label at all. So beyond the blockers, one review fact also outranks an explicit human request:

• nobody reviewed this head — every approval staled by a push → state:addressing, because the agent owes a re-request

That case is more dangerous than any blocker: a blocked PR at least shows an X or a disabled merge button, while a staled-approval PR reads green, mergeable and "waiting on the human" over code no reviewer has seen.

UNKNOWN mergeability is deliberately not treated as a conflict. GitHub reports it for about a minute after every merge while it recomputes, and flapping every open PR through blocker:conflict on each merge would be worse than the bug this fixes. A failed read of either branch fact degrades to the same "do not know" value, for the same reason.

An unfinished round still yields to an explicit human request — a maintainer pulling a PR to themselves early is a deliberate act. MISSING (nobody has reviewed yet) and STALE (everyone reviewed something else) are different facts and are treated differently.

Cross-cutting (PRs and issues)

Label	Color	Meaning
stale	#B60205	No activity for 48h. Sweep-managed, never hand-applied. state:building + stale is precisely a forgotten draft.
blocked	#6A737D	Waiting on another PR or issue to land first. Quiet legitimately — the staleness sweep skips it.
release	#0E8A16	Release flow, versioning, and packaging work.
merge-next	#0E8A16	Head of the merge queue — merge this one next. Queue order is intent (which PR lands first, given how they conflict), so the reconciler never sets it: you or the agent maintaining the queue do. The reconciler only clears it, the moment the PR stops being something a human could merge — so it cannot go stale the way state:needs-human did.

Scope — which surface? (PRs and issues, any number)

All scopes share one calm color, #C5DEF5 — scopes locate, states alert.

Label	Covers
scope:cli	bin/box — the command surface itself
scope:installer	install.sh, the versioned install layout, upgrade/uninstall
scope:host	host/ — setup-host, teardown, the firewall and isolation stack
scope:tiers	the restricted tier — grant/revoke, multi-user semantics
scope:templates	templates/ — the box seeds
scope:drill	drill/ — the rehearsals, doctor, RUNS.md

Issue types

bug, enhancement, documentation — issues only. PRs carry their type in the conventional title (feat:, fix:, docs:), so typing a PR with a label would just say the same thing twice, drifting apart eventually.

Maintenance

State labels are machine-owned, with exactly one exception. Every state above is derivable from GitHub's own facts — the draft flag, requested reviewers, review states, push timestamps — so the labels workflow (.github/workflows/labels.yml) recomputes the state and reconciles labels statelessly, on PR events (label changes included) plus a 15-minute cron. A hand-moved label is a lie waiting to happen; the workflow asserts the effective state instead.

The exception is state:needs-human, which the author sets at handoff (CONTRIBUTING.md, step 6). That is an optimistic write, not a transfer of ownership: because pull_request_target: labeled wakes the workflow, the author's own label write fires the sweep that validates it, and a handoff that had not earned the label is corrected within seconds.

It exists because the wake signal was missing. There is no pull_request_review_target — on fork PRs, which is all of them here, pull_request_review runs read-only and cannot label anything — so the moment the label becomes true, the third approval landing, fired nothing at all. What was left was the */15 cron, and GitHub deprioritises short intervals hard enough that the delivered rate is closer to hourly. The label could therefore lag the round it described by hours, worst on the quietest repo: every sweep reconciles the whole board, so a busy repo stays fresh by piggybacking on unrelated PR events, while a quiet one depends on the cron most and receives it least. scope: labels on PRs are applied from the changed paths by actions/labeler (.github/labeler.yml); CONTRIBUTING.md says who sets what.

The same workflow bootstraps the taxonomy: a manual dispatch creates any missing label idempotently. To create them by hand (needs push access):

gh label create "state:building"       --color FBCA04 --description "PR is a draft — the coding agent is still building" --force
gh label create "state:bots-reviewing" --color 1D76DB --description "Waiting on the bot reviewers to finish the round" --force
gh label create "state:addressing"     --color D93F0B --description "All bots reviewed — coding agent owes the single reply + fixes" --force
gh label create "blocker:conflict"     --color B60205 --description "Does not merge — the branch conflicts and the agent owes a rebase" --force
gh label create "blocker:ci-red"       --color B60205 --description "A check is failing — the agent owes a fix (not a rebase)" --force
gh label create "blocker:unrequested"  --color E99695 --description "Somebody still owes a verdict and nobody was asked for one" --force
# retired — the reconciler strips it; delete it once no PR carries it
# gh label delete "state:needs-rebase"
gh label create "state:needs-human"    --color 8250DF --description "No blockers, all bots approve — waiting on the human reviewer" --force
gh label create "merge-next"           --color 0E8A16 --description "Head of the merge queue — merge this one next (set by hand/agent, cleared here)" --force
gh label create "stale"                --color B60205 --description "No activity for 48h — needs a poke (sweep-managed)" --force
gh label create "blocked"              --color 6A737D --description "Waiting on another PR or issue to land first" --force
gh label create "release"              --color 0E8A16 --description "Release flow and version/packaging work" --force
gh label create "scope:cli"            --color C5DEF5 --description "bin/box — the command surface" --force
gh label create "scope:installer"      --color C5DEF5 --description "install.sh, versioned installs, upgrade/uninstall" --force
gh label create "scope:host"           --color C5DEF5 --description "host/ — setup, teardown, firewall, isolation stack" --force
gh label create "scope:tiers"          --color C5DEF5 --description "restricted tier — grant/revoke, multi-user" --force
gh label create "scope:templates"      --color C5DEF5 --description "templates/ — the box seeds" --force
gh label create "scope:drill"          --color C5DEF5 --description "drill/ — rehearsals, doctor, RUNS.md" --force
# delete is not an upsert: a label that is already gone exits non-zero. Swallow
# that, so this block converges on re-run instead of erroring after first success.
for L in duplicate invalid question wontfix "help wanted" "good first issue"; do
  gh label delete "$L" --yes 2>/dev/null || true
done