cast/CONTRIBUTING.md
dan-claude-bot 00c748c879 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 19:31:04 +00:00

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# 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:`).
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**: `npm run check`, `npm run build`, and
`npm test` locally mirror what CI runs.
## Labels — who sets what
The full taxonomy lives in [LABELS.md](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](.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](.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.