The owner's report: the process works but every stage takes a long time even on
simple bugs. Two causes, and neither was the one that first comes to mind.
The reviewer ran everything regardless. On #89 it installed Chromium, ran all 127
smoke files and a full golden capture — right for a task rated 10/10 for
complexity, absurd for a bug about a room divider. Full suites are the pre-beta
gate; the review now runs typecheck, unit and build always, and smokes, golden,
pytest or performance only where the diff and the AC call for them. The price of
narrowing it is honesty: the reviewer must list which gates it ran, which it did
not, and why, so a skipped gate is a visible decision rather than a silent one.
The reviewer also built its own environment out of model turns, with no npm cache
and no browser cache, paid for from the same forty-five minutes. The workflow now
installs dependencies and Chromium as ordinary cached steps, after switching to
the task branch so the lockfile is the branch's own.
Second, ceremony did not scale down. The light track makes a spec cheap; the new
trivial track does without one — S2-analysis straight to S5-ready, no spec review,
AC in the issue body. It is deliberately hard to qualify for: a bug on one surface,
no new UX contract, no migration, no i18n, no perf or touch effect, three checkable
AC at most, and expected behaviour already on record. Nothing left to decide is the
criterion that holds the whole thing up, and it cannot be met by feeling sure.
Code review is never skipped on either track. It is what stands in for testing
here, so it is the one stage speed may not buy.
Issue: #127
Issue: #128
User-Visible: no
The owner's report: the process works but every stage takes a long time even on
simple bugs. Two causes, and neither was the one that first comes to mind.
The reviewer ran everything regardless. On #89 it installed Chromium, ran all 127
smoke files and a full golden capture — right for a task rated 10/10 for
complexity, absurd for a bug about a room divider. Full suites are the pre-beta
gate; the review now runs typecheck, unit and build always, and smokes, golden,
pytest or performance only where the diff and the AC call for them. The price of
narrowing it is honesty: the reviewer must list which gates it ran, which it did
not, and why, so a skipped gate is a visible decision rather than a silent one.
The reviewer also built its own environment out of model turns, with no npm cache
and no browser cache, paid for from the same forty-five minutes. The workflow now
installs dependencies and Chromium as ordinary cached steps, after switching to
the task branch so the lockfile is the branch's own.
Second, ceremony did not scale down. The light track makes a spec cheap; the new
trivial track does without one — S2-analysis straight to S5-ready, no spec review,
AC in the issue body. It is deliberately hard to qualify for: a bug on one surface,
no new UX contract, no migration, no i18n, no perf or touch effect, three checkable
AC at most, and expected behaviour already on record. Nothing left to decide is the
criterion that holds the whole thing up, and it cannot be met by feeling sure.
Code review is never skipped on either track. It is what stands in for testing
here, so it is the one stage speed may not buy.
Issue: #127
Issue: #128
User-Visible: no
Issues labelled before the pipeline existed keep their spec straight in dev and
have no issue/NN branch. The publish step quietly exited zero for them, so the
verdict would arrive as a comment and the analysis behind it would be thrown
away — the fifth instance today of a step reporting success by doing nothing.
The document now goes wherever the spec itself lives: the task branch when there
is one, dev otherwise. Publishing also survives dev moving on while the review
ran, which takes up to forty-five minutes, by rebasing once before it gives up.
Four issues are waiting on this — #12, #30, #44 and #52 — each with a spec in dev,
a status label applied during the bulk pass in August and a review that never ran
because nothing was there to raise the event.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The two copies of this file must match byte for byte; a comment line had drifted
by one character. main is the copy the issues event actually reads, so it is the
reference. Trivial in itself, and worth closing anyway: the file's own header
warns that a divergence between these two branches is one of the ways this
pipeline fails quietly.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The guard refused to review any issue the owner had not filed himself. The rule
was meant to keep malformed outside reports out of the pipeline, but it checked at
every step instead of at the entrance, and it duplicated a guarantee the platform
already gives: only someone with write access can apply a label. Applying the
first status label is the owner's explicit decision, and it is the only place the
question belongs.
So the author check is gone. While an issue carries no status label it sits
outside the process and the invariants do not apply; once labelled, the task is in
flight and who filed it stops mattering.
The old rule also cost real work. On #123 an outside bug report had been analysed
and specified before the guard turned it away in nine seconds, and the remedy on
offer was to refile the same thing as the owner's own issue.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
A review label promises work. When the guard declined it wrote the reason to the
run log and nothing else, so the issue sat in a status nobody was acting on and
nobody could tell. #123 showed it: an outside reporter's issue was walked up to
S4-spec-review, the guard refused in nine seconds because only the owner's issues
enter the process, and the issue itself said not a word.
Refusals that a human can act on now become a comment: wrong author, blocked,
review-4. Only when a stage was actually recognised, so an unrelated label change
stays silent.
This is the same defect as the merge conflict that left the label untouched, seen
from the other side. The pattern is worth naming: doing nothing quietly is the
most expensive thing a pipeline can do.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The implementation loop runs typecheck, unit and build. Golden, browser smokes,
performance and the full HA harness run before a beta — after the code review has
passed and the issue already sits in S8-merged. Some defects cannot surface any
earlier, and until now the process had nothing to say about them, so the honest
reading was a second full review cycle at the most expensive possible moment.
The owner's decision: fix it, re-run what failed, and a green run carries the
release on. The gate named the defect precisely and the same gate proves the fix,
so the check is objective and depends on nobody's judgement.
The boundary is written down with it, because "the gate found something" could
otherwise absorb an arbitrary amount of new work. A fix that changes a behaviour
contract, reaches an untouched subsystem or rivals the task in size goes through
the normal flow. Editing a test so it stops failing is concealment rather than
repair — the exception is a defect proven to be in the fixture, as on #89.
The rule also records what it costs: the author judges his own work here, which
the process refuses everywhere else. That is the price of speed at the one point
where a review cycle is dearest, and the compensation is that the re-run command
and its result are written into the issue where the release manager reads them.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
A review run always moves the label. The rule is written down because its absence
cost a real stall: a green code review whose merge conflicted left the label alone,
the waiting author polled thirty times and reported the limit as exhausted, and a
verdict that existed reached nobody.
Both documents now say what S6-in-progress means when the verdict was green and
only the merge failed — rebase, not rework, and the verdict still stands. They also
say that a label which did not change means the run failed rather than the work, so
the answer is logs and the owner, not more polling. Cycles are counted per stage.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
A green code review whose merge conflicted used to leave the label where it was.
That is a dead end: the author waits for the label to change, so it polled thirty
times and reported the limit as exhausted — on a task the reviewer had already
passed. The verdict existed and nobody could act on it.
The merge step no longer fails the job. It reports whether it merged, and a green
review that did not merge sends the task back to S6-in-progress, because the work
did return to the author — a rebase rather than a code fix, and the comment says
so and says the verdict still stands.
The invariant is now stronger and worth stating plainly: after a review run the
label always changes. A pipeline whose state can stall silently is worse than one
that reports the wrong state loudly.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The step that comments on the issue when a review run dies carried a literal
backslash instead of a line continuation, so gh received four arguments and
--repo ran as a command of its own. The handler for failures would itself have
failed, silently, and only when something had already gone wrong.
bash -n does not catch this: the syntax is valid, the meaning is not. Checking
run blocks now also means looking for a doubled backslash at end of line.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The guard counted every verdict comment on the issue, so a spec-review verdict
consumed a cycle from the code-review budget. On #89 the first code review came
out as r2/4. With two spec cycles the second code review would have hit review-4
after a single fix — the limit would have fired on a task nobody had reviewed
twice.
The stage is now resolved first and only its own verdicts are counted, recognised
by the review document named in the comment. If the document is missing the
verdict is not counted: undercounting grants an extra cycle, overcounting would
stop the work early, and of the two mistakes the recoverable one wins.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
Git skips a hook without the bit and says nothing about it, so the gate
would have reported success by being absent. The API cannot set the mode:
a file pushed that way arrives as 100644.
Issue: #121
User-Visible: no
docs/specs/README.md kept a "Статус ТЗ" column with its own vocabulary — draft,
in implementation, done — next to the labels that already hold the status. Two
dictionaries for one fact drift apart, and these had: the column still called
issues "in implementation" that were closed weeks ago. The table now says only
which issue a spec belongs to.
AGENTS.md was telling agents that PROCESS.md §1 does not cover package.json and
the rest of the configuration, and to report it as missing. It covers them now.
The same paragraph gained the rule that D beats A where paths overlap, which is
what keeps the built bundle under custom_components/houseplan/frontend/ from
reading as product source.
Issue: #119
User-Visible: no
Section 10.1 promised pre-push as the blocking gate that replaces pull requests.
The hook did not exist, so the document promised a check that was not there —
worse than saying nothing, because a promise like that gets relied on. Until now
process-gate ran only as the catch-up job in CI, which reports after the code is
already in dev.
The hook skips branch deletions and tags, and for a branch the remote has not
seen it measures from the merge-base with dev rather than from the root, or every
violation committed before the gate existed would make it impossible to pass. A
missing script does not block a push: old checkouts and worktrees have to stay
usable.
gh is optional on purpose. Reading issue status needs the network, and a hook
that cannot work on a train is a hook people switch off; offline it runs what it
can and CI does the strict pass.
The executable bit is the quiet part. Git skips a hook without +x and says
nothing — the gate reports success by being absent. Measured on a real push:
mode 644 produces zero lines from the gate and the push goes through, 755 stops
it. The API cannot set the bit, so install-hooks restores it on every install.
Issue: #121
User-Visible: no
PROCESS.md 10.2 item 10 asks for this to happen because a beta shipped, not
because someone remembered. The manual cleanup was skipped twice and both times
it broke the invariant that a closed issue carries no status label — the one
thing `verify` leans on. A manual step that falls due right after a successful
release is the worst kind: the work already looks finished, which is precisely
why it gets forgotten.
The job comments the tag, removes the label, then closes. That order is
deliberate: dying between the two steps leaves an open issue without a status,
which is visible and fixable in the flow, where the reverse order would recreate
the breakage this exists to prevent. It ends by asserting that no closed issue
still carries S8-merged — aimed at the defect that actually recurs rather than at
the invariant in general.
The stock token is used on purpose. Events caused by GITHUB_TOKEN do not start
workflows, so stripping the label cannot wake the review pipeline; a PAT here
would turn bookkeeping into a cascade.
Issue: #120
User-Visible: no
Check 2 compared the Issue trailers against whatever branch the working tree
happened to be on, over whatever range it was given. Those two are not the same
set. After a rebase the CI range widens — `before` points at a discarded commit,
the merge-base slides back, and commits that belong to dev arrive carrying other
issue numbers. Every one of them then looks like a violation.
Running the gate over real history from issue/89 with a dev range produced 26
false refusals out of 26 commits, which would have reddened Validate on the next
force-push of any task branch.
The rule now reads origin/dev..HEAD for its own verdict and leaves the event
range to the other checks. A commit that genuinely carries the wrong trailer for
its branch is still caught; the integration test covers both directions.
Issue: #105
User-Visible: no
The canon moved into the repository in #112 and then stood still while the
process kept moving. A document that lags is worse than no document: an agent
reading it as truth acts on rules that no longer exist. It promised a pre-push
hook that was never written, named labels in Russian that the repository has
never used, listed a status set the gate no longer applies, and said nothing at
all about the event-driven pipeline — the largest mechanism the process has.
Label names are now English throughout and S8-merged is documented. Section 1
covers the configuration files the gate kept reporting as unclassified, and
records that D beats A where paths overlap, since the built bundle lives inside
custom_components/houseplan/frontend/. Section 10.1 admits that pre-push does
not exist. Section 10.2 matches ALLOWED_STATUS in scripts/process-gate.mjs,
including the two caveats that only surfaced once the pipeline ran. Section 10.4
is new and documents the four silent-failure traps that cost a working day each.
The source-of-truth order now says that actual automation outranks its own
description — this document included.
Issue: #119
User-Visible: no
Practice had already diverged from the documents: #105, #112, #114 and #116 were
all done without a spec and without review, and that was right. Nothing said it
was allowed.
The test is mechanical — not a single class A file — rather than left to the
executor's judgement, because a loose reading is exactly how product changes
would learn to skip review.
Issue: #118
User-Visible: no
PROCESS.md 10.2 describes scripts/process-gate.mjs; the script never existed.
Commits go straight to dev without PRs and GitHub blocks nothing on its side, so
until now the only thing standing between the process and rule #1 was the good
faith of whoever was committing. Hooks catch a violation on the author's machine
but --no-verify walks past them; this job is the catch-up pass that cannot be
skipped locally.
Checks 1-7 offline, 8 through gh, plus the escalation of check 3: a class A
commit with neither a spec file nor the `small` label is a failure, not a
warning. Check 8 is fail closed — an unreachable or closed issue is a refusal,
never a silent pass.
Two things surfaced while wiring it up and are recorded in the script header.
S8-merged had to join the allowed statuses: the pipeline merges into dev before
it moves the label, so Validate reads the issue already advanced and a strict set
would redden every accepted task. And the status question now applies only to
class A/B commits — asking it of a review document would fail every time, since
that document lands while the issue sits in S4-spec-review or S7-code-review.
Issue: #105
User-Visible: no
Review fires from the label and runs on its own, but nothing was picking the
result up: the author reported "handed over for review" and stopped, so the
conveyor stalled until the owner said a sentence. The author now polls the label
and continues from whatever it became.
Also drops the merge-into-dev standing permission: the pipeline does the merge
before setting S8-merged, so a hand merge would race it.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
Keeps dev identical to main so the broken revision does not come back at the
next promotion. The workflow only fires from the default branch, but a stale
copy here would overwrite the working one.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
Pushing the hook through the GitHub contents API dropped its mode to 100644.
assertHookMode caught it on the next commit, which is the gate working as
intended — a non-executable commit-msg would simply never run.
Also brings dev in line with the turn-limit fix already on main.
Issue: #116
User-Visible: no
Agents were escalating technical calls. The owner answers what a person sees
or does and how much user-visible change belongs in an issue; storage, module
layout, naming, test strategy and migration mechanics are settled by the
agents, recorded as assumptions and challenged in review.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
Without it S8-merged would be a lie: the label asserts the code is in dev,
while the branch-only push leaves it on the task branch. What lands is what
the reviewer just accepted, and dev is allowed to carry unreviewed code
anyway, so the merge adds no risk the branch did not already carry.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The hook parsed the message path with basename, an external command. Where
it is missing from PATH the substitution yields an empty string, set -e does
not trip on it, and the MERGE_MSG guard silently stops working — a generated
merge commit would then be rejected for missing trailers it cannot have.
POSIX parameter expansion needs no external command and behaves the same in
sh, dash, bash and Git Bash.
Issue: #116
User-Visible: no
The reviewer runs in CI and can only read the remote, so an unpushed spec or
commit either stalls the review or points it at the wrong tree. Pushing
issue/<NN>-slug now needs no command; dev, main, merges, tags and releases
still do.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
The first live run failed with "Could not fetch an OIDC token": the action
needs id-token: write to authenticate the GitHub App.
The reviewer also checked out dev, where the material under review does not
exist yet — specs and code are committed to issue/<NN>-slug. The job now
switches to that branch when it is pushed, and warns loudly when it is not.
Issue: #114
User-Visible: no
Matysh