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>
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