Rule 8 demanded a working S-label from every class A/B commit's issue,
while owner decision #118 sends infrastructure work outside the S1..S8
flow entirely — such an issue has no status label by construction. The
two rules contradicted each other and the machine-checked one won, so
Validate on dev went red on every infrastructure commit (#175, #191,
#202, #206) and the catch-up signal stopped meaning anything. A gate that
is always red is not a gate.
The waiver keys on the diff, not on a permission label: a range with no
class A file at all. An `infra` label could be pinned on a product task
to walk a product commit past the status check; ceasing to touch class A
without ceasing to be infrastructure work is not possible. Issue
existence, open state, `blocked` and fail-closed on an unreachable gh all
still apply, and the waiver prints a visible warning rather than passing
in silence.
Mutation-checked both ways: unwiring the waiver reddens the CLI test,
and letting class A keep the waiver reddens both new tests.
Issue: #207
User-Visible: no
performance_smoke burned nearly all of its 15-minute budget before the
benchmark even started, twice in a row: validate.yml had no browser cache
at all, so every browser job paid for a full `playwright install
--with-deps` — apt work the ubuntu-latest image makes redundant, with
unbounded retries against an unreachable azure mirror on top. For a
measuring job that is worse than lost minutes: the timing window competes
with package installation on the same runner.
#175 fixed this for the review pipeline but deliberately left the flag
here, reasoning that a prerelease gate values predictability over
minutes. That reasoning was wrong — the flag is what made the gate
unpredictable.
Browsers are now cached per package-lock hash in smoke, golden,
performance_smoke and the full performance run; installation happens only
on a cache miss and no longer touches apt. performance_smoke keeps
headroom for a cold cache at 20 minutes. If the image ever drops a
required library, Chromium fails to launch with a clear missing-libraries
error; that is the moment to bring the flag back.
Issue: #206
User-Visible: no
Filing and servicing a separate issue costs far more than fixing a small
problem in place — the owner's call of 2026-08-19 (#202). A Medium finding
inside the task's scope no longer becomes its own issue: with no High
findings the verdict is yellow, the author fixes it and the fix passes
another review cycle. Only an out-of-scope Medium is still filed
separately, because foreign scope is never patched from a task branch.
Applied to the canon (PROCESS.md), the reviewer prompt in process.yml and
AGENTS.md; the verdict format now writes "Medium: N -> in-task | #NN".
Issue: #202
User-Visible: no
Sergey Matyunin