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>
Review round on #114. Both blockers were real and reproduced here.
The re-arm and the older extraction guard contradicted each other: that
guard asserted the TOP section extracts non-empty, and CONTRIBUTING now
mandates a deliberately EMPTY `## Unreleased` on top of the stamp. The
mandated ceremony tree was CI-red — #108's unshippability by another
route. Keying to the top section was only ever a stand-in for "what
release.yml publishes", so the assert now names that section: on a bare
version the `## X.Y.Z` being shipped, on a `-dev` tree the newest
stamped one. rig#67 retargeted the identical assert for the same reason.
And a bare version with no matching stamped section — bumped, never
stamped — passed every test and failed only after the merge, in
release.yml's notes step, past the ship decision. Red here instead.
Plus a double re-arm (two `## Unreleased` headings, the extracted
section silently the empty first one) is now red.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Repair main's missing `## Unreleased`, re-arm in the CONTRIBUTING ceremony
step, and add a version-keyed guard in test/release.test.ts.
Cross-refs heavy-duty/rig#66 (origin, confirmed occurrence) and
heavy-duty/box#108 (box sibling).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
claude-bot's round-4 blockers: (1) a declared permissions: block zeroes
every unspecified scope, so the decide step's label read
(commits/<sha>/pulls) and the bump fallback's gh pr create could only
403 — every genuine ceremony would end red at the label check, the exact
failure shape this feature exists to kill, one layer down. labels.yml
already carries the precedent; pull-requests: write added with the two
consumers named. (2) CONTRIBUTING still prescribed the follow-up bump PR
the workflow now performs itself, and the changelog entry described the
old PR-base interlock — both now tell the shipped story (event.before
interlock, self-re-arm, manual-path bump stays the operator's). Nits
taken: fetch-depth 2 for the all-zeros fallback's first parent, re-runs
refuse-loudly wording, the bump-window arithmetic comment.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
box#95 taught the family that a forgotten manual tag is the worst
failure shape: silent, no red X, a release that simply doesn't happen.
The ship decision already lives in the ceremony PR — the one whose whole
diff is the version leaving -dev, carrying the reviews and the
maintainer's merge — so tagging after it is transcription, and
transcription belongs to the machine (box#96's design; this is cast's
twin).
release.yml now also triggers on pull_request closed against main,
gated on merged == true AND the hand-set release label. The merge path
asserts four facts in order, each fail-loud and creating nothing: the
merged package.json version is non--dev (read via node, never regex —
the pkg_version discipline); the version CHANGED in this PR (base vs
merge — the -dev interlock, so a mislabeled ordinary PR fails loudly);
the version's changelog section extracts non-empty via the existing
release-notes.sh; and no tag or release exists yet (idempotent re-runs,
and the loud answer to a manual-tag race). Then, in the same job, it
tags the merge commit via the API and publishes. Same-job is
load-bearing: a GITHUB_TOKEN-created tag triggers no workflows, so the
tag-push path cannot fire on it and double-publish.
Both trigger paths converge on literally the same steps — each entry
step exports RELEASE_VERSION, and the notes extraction, the exact
existing asset build (npm ci, npm run build, npm prune --omit=dev,
staged as cast-X.Y.Z/), and the gh release create read only that — so
the paths cannot drift and the installer keeps finding the one asset
name it knows, cast-X.Y.Z.tgz. The tag-push path survives as the
documented manual fallback and backfill, and it matters immediately:
0.1.0 never carried -dev (cast predates the ritual), so the interlock
correctly does not fire for #110's ceremony — that one ships by manual
tag, and the automation applies from 0.1.1 on.
test/release.test.ts pins the new wiring in the house grep style,
fail-closed: the merged+labeled gate, the four asserts strictly ordered
ahead of tag/build/publish, the single job, the anti-recursion comment,
and that no per-path asset name exists. CONTRIBUTING.md's Releasing now
says it plainly: merge is the ship decision; the tag is the fallback.
Fixes#111
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cast half of the flow designed in heavy-duty/box#83, aligned with
box#90 and rig#40, plus the piece unique to cast: a prebuilt release
asset, because cast is the one repo where the source tarball is not the
package.
- CHANGELOG.md (box's format) with this PR's entry under Unreleased;
feature PRs land their entry as part of the PR.
- `cast --version` / `-V` answers with package.json's version, read
relative to the compiled module so a source checkout and an installed
prebuilt tree agree.
- release.yml, on EVERY tag push (no shape filter — a mismatched tag
must fail the assert loudly, not be pattern-skipped): asserts tag ==
package.json version FIRST, extracts that version's changelog section
(.github/scripts/release-notes.sh, shared with the tests; missing or
empty refuses), builds once (npm ci && npm run build && npm prune
--omit=dev), stages bin/ dist/ node_modules/ package.json as
cast-X.Y.Z/ and attaches cast-X.Y.Z.tgz to `gh release create
--verify-tag`. No tests here — ci.yml gated the merge commit, and the
suite needs age.
- install.sh grows the three channels: default = the latest release's
asset (tag resolved off the releases/latest redirect Location — no
API, no token; failure dies loudly naming CAST_REF=main, never a
silent fallback), CAST_REF=<tag> = pinned (asset first, source
fallback), CAST_REF=main = dev build-from-source. npm is required
only on the source path, and a prebuilt tree is sanity-checked
(dist/, node_modules/) before $DEST is replaced.
- test/release.test.ts drives it all offline: --version, the extraction
against fixtures (0.7.0 never matches 0.7.0-rc1) and the real
changelog, and REAL install.sh runs through all three channels with a
stub curl and a poisoned npm — including the loud no-releases refusal
with no $DEST side effects.
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>
