rig/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 in three acts, in this order: post the tagged round summary, request the maintainer's review, then set state:needs-human yourself — removing the state label it replaces. The review request is what earns the label, provided the PR carries no blocker:* label. A blocker means the work is still yours whatever the round said, so on a conflicted or red PR neither the request nor your own label write will stick — the sweep takes it straight back off. With three formal head-current approvals the labels workflow requests the maintainer automatically; when part of the panel is comment-only, reading their agreement is the author's judgment, so the author makes the request.

   Writing the label by hand is an optimistic write, not a transfer of ownership. The machine stays the authority — but because the workflow wakes on labeled, the author's own write fires the sweep that validates it, and a handoff that had not earned the label is corrected seconds later. Forgetting the write is not a failure either; it only means the label waits for the cron, which is the lag this replaced.

7. Checks must be green: shellcheck, bash test/cli.sh and bash test/release.sh locally mirror what CI runs; the db dump/restore round-trip (test/db-integration.sh) executes in CI where Docker is present.

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.

Changelog entries

Every PR that changes behaviour adds one line to ## Unreleased. One line is the whole rule — if it wraps more than twice in your editor, cut it down.

• Say what changed, and stop. Why it was wrong, how it was found, what it cost, what it implies — that belongs in the PR body and the commit message, which is where anyone chasing the reasoning already goes. This file answers one question: what is different in this version.
• Any word that can be removed, is removed.
• Lead with the surface, not the mechanism. "state:needs-human is set at handoff" beats "the labels workflow now also wakes on labeled".
• Cite the issue or PR — (#96) — and let the reader follow it for the rest.
• Mark a breaking change with a leading BREAKING:.
• Group under ### Added / ### Changed / ### Fixed / ### Removed.
• No bold run-in headings, no sub-paragraphs, no code blocks, no prose essays.

Good:

• state:needs-human is set at handoff, not by the cron (#96)
• An unreadable check rollup no longer reads as "nothing is failing" (#90)
• BREAKING: --class human|server is now --root-door closed|open (#77)

Not an entry — that is a PR body:

• state:needs-human no longer waits on the cron to become true (#96) — the labels workflow now also wakes on pull_request_target: labeled and unlabeled, and the author sets it themselves when handing a PR over. A review landing was never a trigger. There is no pull_request_review_target, and on fork PRs — which is all of them here — ...

Releasing

A release is a PR, and merging it is the release (#47; box#96's design, on top of #32/box#83's tag flow). It takes the ordinary PR loop above, with one extra gate before the handoff:

draft → ready → bot round → drill → state:needs-human → maintainer merge (which IS the release).

The drill is a real-hardware run — tenant guests minted and converged via box, test/db-integration.sh, the GitHub runner lifecycle against a fork, a coolify install — recorded in one file per version:

drills/<version>.md

named for the version exactly as VERSION carries it. See drills/README.md for what a record should contain.

.github/scripts/drill-recorded.sh enforces it on every release: a bare VERSION with no non-empty drills/<version>.md turns CI red, naming the version. It is not a thing a reviewer has to remember — that is how every release in this family shipped undrilled until a bot finally blocked on one. On a -dev tree it asserts nothing, so it is invisible to ordinary PRs. rig reads rig's own record and never box's repo: a cross-repo lookup fails on a token, a fork checkout or a network blip, and all of those degrade to "pass" — the UNREADABLE-vs-NONE shape #90 fixed.

One file per version is what keeps the guard small. Records used to share a single log, which forced a heading grammar, an optional-date tail, a whole-version comparison and a non-blank-body rule just to read them back — and both sibling repos shipped a defect out of that complexity in review. Now 0.3.0.md and 0.3.0-rc1.md are simply different files.

The three repos' drills are INDEPENDENT. Run them in any order, on any schedule, in separate sittings. What makes that safe is that every drill pins the same fixed set of candidate refs: rig's drill runs --host yes with BOX_REF=release/<box-version>, so it exercises the box that will actually ship; box's drill mints with RIG_REF=release/<rig-version>, so it exercises the rig that will actually ship. Both measure the same pair.

That — not sequencing — is what dissolves the box↔rig recursion. box and rig are mutually recursive (rig bootstrap … --host yes installs box and runs box's setup-host; box's box new seeds converge back through rig's installer at @RIG_REPO@/@RIG_REF@), but the refs are static identifiers that exist as soon as the release branches do, long before any drill runs, so a cycle at runtime becomes independent tests against one fixed pair. Within a single drill you naturally bring the substrate up before probing it — a host before a guest — but that is how you run a drill, not an ordering rule between repos.

Each repo drills in a different way and asserts a different thing: rig asserts convergence (a machine reaches its role, idempotently), box asserts the isolation contract (the VM trust boundary), cast asserts promotion (A→B reproduces, the diff is idempotent). Three different exercises sharing a substrate, not three phases of one script — which is exactly why the records are per-repo.

It drills candidate refs, not released artifacts. RIG_REPO/RIG_REF are mint-time environment variables (default heavy-duty/rig@main), so a run pins the exact commits under test. That is what dissolves the chicken-and-egg: no repo has to be released before another can be drilled.

Drilling the candidate IS drilling the release. A release PR's diff is VERSION + CHANGELOG.md and nothing else — no executable difference exists between the tree that was drilled and the tree that ships.

Drills that share a substrate share one run ID. Each repo records its own legs in its own drills/<version>.md, citing that run ID and the other two repos' commit SHAs, so the records can be joined after the fact by anyone reading them. The guard still reads only this repo's file — there is no cross-repo lookup anywhere in the gate. Releases do not have to be published in a fixed order. If a defect shows up only in the combination: patch, re-drill, re-record. The three releases converge on a set that holds together; they are not required to be right in one pass.

A maintainer waiver is possible — a doc-only release, a hardware outage — but it must be recorded in drills/<version>.md for that version, saying who waived it and why. The guard asks for a record, not a passing result, precisely so that skipping is a deliberate, reviewable commit instead of a silence. Deleting the check is not the move.

The mechanics:

1. A small PR — release: X.Y.Z, carrying the release label — bumps VERSION from X.Y.Z-dev and stamps CHANGELOG.md's Unreleased section as ## X.Y.Z — YYYY-MM-DD. Then re-arm the file in the same PR: add a fresh, empty ## Unreleased immediately above the section you just stamped (#66). Stamping alone disarms main — a PR authored before the release and merged after it wrote its entry under ## Unreleased, and with that heading gone git files the entry under whatever now occupies the position, which is the release that already shipped. It lands cleanly, with no conflict and nothing for the author to notice, so the empty section is the only thing standing between a late merge and a changelog that misattributes a shipped release. No workflow does this for you: release.yml re-arms VERSION, never the changelog. test/release.sh enforces the pairing — whenever VERSION ends in -dev the top section must be ## Unreleased. CI green on it, same loop as any PR.
2. Merge it — that IS the ship decision. release.yml's release-on-merge job asserts, in order, fail-loud, creating nothing: the merged tree's VERSION is non--dev; this PR is the one that changed it (a mislabeled ordinary PR fails here); the changelog section for that version extracts non-empty; no tag or release exists yet. Then, same job, it tags the merge commit bare X.Y.Z (no v prefix — box's tag scheme) and publishes the GitHub release with that section as the body. No assets — the source tarball for the tag is the package install.sh downloads.
3. The release re-arms main itself: the same workflow run bumps VERSION 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, loudly). A dev install therefore never impersonates the release in the versions/<v> layout. On the manual tag path the bump stays yours: open the one-line PR after publishing.

Manual fallback (and backfill): if the merge-path run fails, fix what it named, then tag the merge commit X.Y.Z by hand and push the tag — the original tag-push job still turns any correct tag into the release, and the merge path's nothing-exists-yet assert keeps the two from double-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 on PR events (label changes included) and every 15 minutes. Machine-owned, with one exception: the author sets state:needs-human at handoff (step 6) and the workflow reconciles it. Otherwise never by hand. Exactly one per PR: whose ball is it.
blocker:*	the same workflow, from the same facts — what is in the way. Any number per PR, or none. Never by hand: applying one does not stop a merge, and removing one does not unblock anything. Fix the thing and the next sweep drops the label.
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.
merge-next	you or the agent owning the queue. Which PR lands first is a judgement about how they conflict, so the workflow never sets it — it only clears it, the moment the PR stops being something a human could merge.
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.