cast/CONTRIBUTING.md
dan-claude-bot 42d138edbf refactor: the author escalates — drop the agreement-body heuristic
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>
2026-07-18 19:51:55 +00:00

3.7 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:).
  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. The machine never reads review bodies: when a comment-only reviewer's line is really an agreement, that judgment belongs to the author — escalate by requesting the maintainer's review (step 6), and the reconciler flips the label on that request, because an explicit request is a fact it can trust.
  6. When the round passes, the author hands the PR to the maintainer by requesting their review — that request is what flips state:needs-human. With three formal head-current approvals the labels workflow requests it automatically; when part of the panel is comment-only, reading their agreement is the author's judgment, so the author makes the request.
  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. 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.