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
The canonical job list predated the `docs` job (added 2026-08-16) and
omitted `process-gate`. `docs` is a real blocking gate — its fingerprint
check went red right after the #113 merge and cost an extra review cycle
of confusion. The list now matches validate.yml and names `changes` as a
service path-filter rather than a gate.
Issue: #191
User-Visible: no
The owner's machine now carries Playwright with Chromium on Windows and a full
WSL environment — verified by execution: 34/34 smoke assertions, and 242 backend
tests passed where native Windows silently skips every test_ha_* file. A red
smoke that reaches the review costs a cycle of forty-five minutes plus the
return trip; run locally it costs a minute, and #89 already paid that price
once.
WSL runs of the full harness and golden verify are advisory. The canon does not
move: the beta gate is CI at the exact SHA, and baselines are accepted only via
golden:accept --reviewed on a complete Linux CI artefact.
Issue: #151
User-Visible: no
Two agents sharing one checkout share one HEAD, and twice in an hour a commit
landed on someone else's task branch that way. The layout that ends it: the main
clone belongs to the author and its task branches, hp-dev is the owner's
permanent worktree on dev, and the reviewer and the infrastructure agent own no
local tree at all — one runs in CI on a fresh checkout, the other reads through
git show and publishes through the API, so it has no HEAD to collide with.
Also recorded: a worktree is only usable on the machine that created it, because
its .git file stores an absolute path in that machine's format. We hit this in
both directions within a day.
Issue: #115
User-Visible: no
The owner stopped using GitHub Projects. Most of this is wording, but one part
was not: release-prerelease.mjs talked to the Project in code. finishIssues
looked up the project id, listed its items and its Status=Done option, and threw
when an issue was missing from the board — so the first release that closed an
issue would have died on a step with nothing to do with publishing. Found by
reading rather than by releasing, which was luck.
Closing issues stays, and now strips the status label first. That order is not
cosmetic: the invariant that a closed issue carries no status label has broken
twice already, both times because a manual step did it the other way round. The
close-merged job already does it in this order.
The documents now say labels and only labels. The explicit "no longer used"
lines are kept on purpose, in PROCESS.md and next to the code that used to sync:
a decision that vanishes quietly gets reintroduced a month later by someone who
never knew it was made.
Issue: #139
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Publishes the 538-line process canon into the repository, replacing the
51-line provenance stub that pointed at a non-existent .agents/PROTOCOL.md.
Rewrites AGENTS.md: product context first, labels as the canonical status,
rule #1 with the status check, change classes, trailers, push cadence,
Codex/Claude roles and review cycle limits.
Issue: #112
User-Visible: no
Matysh