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. 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.

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.