cast/CONTRIBUTING.md

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.
8. Feature PRs land their changelog entry as part of the PR (box's convention): add it under CHANGELOG.md's ## Unreleased heading — that section becomes the release notes verbatim when a release is cut.

Releasing

A release is a PR, and merging it IS the release (#111; box#96's design, on box#83's shape):

1. A small PR — release: X.Y.Z, labeled release — bumps package.json's version (and package-lock.json; npm install --package-lock-only keeps them in step) and stamps CHANGELOG.md's Unreleased section as ## X.Y.Z — YYYY-MM-DD. Then re-arm: add a fresh, empty ## Unreleased immediately above the section you just stamped. The same PR, the same diff — stamping without re-arming leaves main with no ## Unreleased, and the next PR that was authored before the release and merged after has its entry land inside the shipped section, which git does cleanly, with no conflict to warn anyone (heavy-duty/rig#66 — it happened there). test/release.test.ts keys this to the version, and checks both halves of the stamp:

   • while package.json is bare, the top section may be the stamp or the re-armed ## Unreleased, but a ## X.Y.Z section for the version you are shipping must exist and extract non-empty — a bump without a stamp is red here rather than after the merge, in release.yml;
   • the moment step 3's -dev bump lands, the top section must be ## Unreleased or CI is red.

   The empty ## Unreleased this step adds is deliberately tolerated: what must extract non-empty is the section that SHIPS, not the top one. CI green on it, same loop as any PR.

2. Merge. That's the ship decision — nothing else to do. release.yml fires on the merged, release-labeled PR and asserts, in order, each fail-loud and creating nothing: the merged version is non--dev; the version changed in this PR (the -dev transition is the interlock — a mislabeled ordinary PR fails here); that version's changelog section extracts non-empty (.github/scripts/release-notes.sh); and no tag or release exists for it yet. Then, in the same job, it tags the merge commit bare X.Y.Z (no v prefix — box's tag scheme), builds the package once (npm ci && npm run build && npm prune --omit=dev), and publishes the release with the runnable tree — bin/, dist/, production node_modules/, package.json — attached as cast-X.Y.Z.tgz. That asset is what the installer's release channels download: the build happens once, in CI, never on an operator's machine. Manual fallback and backfill: push a bare X.Y.Z tag on the merge commit yourself — the same workflow runs the same asserts, build, and publish from the tag.

3. The release re-arms main itself: the same workflow run bumps package.json (and package-lock.json) to X.Y.(Z+1)-dev and pushes the commit straight to main — no follow-up PR (it opens one only if branch protection refuses the direct push, and says so loudly). Installs are versioned by the tree's package.json version, so a CAST_REF=main install between releases must land as versions/X.Y.(Z+1)-dev, never as versions/X.Y.Z — main's tree must not impersonate the release it merely descends from. On the manual tag path the bump stays yours: open the one-line PR after publishing. This step re-arms the version only — the ## Unreleased heading is step 1's, in the ceremony PR's own diff, because no workflow ever writes CHANGELOG.md. The two halves meet in test/release.test.ts: once this bump makes the version -dev, a missing ## Unreleased is CI-red.

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.