| name | zero-touch |
| description | Canonical definition of zero-touch-by-operator for PR autonomy measurement. Use when evaluating, reporting, or labeling PR autonomy status. |
Zero-Touch-by-Operator
Definition
A PR is zero-touch when AO (Agent Orchestrator) brought it from creation to merge without any manual intervention from a Claude Code terminal session or human operator.
Specifically:
- AO spawned the worker session autonomously (via
ao spawn, lifecycle-worker, or poller)
- The worker drove the PR to N-green (all applicable conditions) without external nudges
skeptic-cron.yml (or equivalent auto-merge gate) merged the PR
N-green criteria
Not all PRs need all 7 green conditions. The merge gate requires all applicable conditions:
| # | Condition | Always required? |
|---|
| 1 | CI passing | Yes |
| 2 | No merge conflicts | Yes |
| 3 | CodeRabbit APPROVED | Yes (unless CR disabled for repo) |
| 4 | Bugbot clean | Yes (unless Bugbot not configured) |
| 5 | Inline comments resolved | Yes |
| 6 | Evidence review pass | Skippable for docs-only, config-only, chore |
| 7 | Skeptic PASS | Skippable for docs-only, config-only, chore |
A docs-only change passing conditions 1-5 is still zero-touch if AO handled it autonomously.
What breaks zero-touch
- A Claude Code terminal session (human-operated) pushed fixes to the PR branch
- A human or terminal session posted review comments, approvals, or merge clicks
- A human dismissed a bot review to unblock merge
- A terminal session ran
@coderabbitai approve or similar to bypass a gate
- A human manually triggered CI re-runs to get past flaky tests
What does NOT break zero-touch
- Jeffrey asking questions about the PR in Slack (observation, not intervention)
- Bot-to-bot interactions (CR, Bugbot, Skeptic, evidence-review-bot)
- AO workers posting
@coderabbitai approve or @coderabbitai all good? (worker doing its job)
- Jeffrey approving the AO spawn itself (dispatch is expected; execution must be autonomous)
Measurement — GitHub actor audit
A PR is zero-touch if the only GitHub actors (commits, reviews, comments, merges) are:
jleechan2015 (AO agent GitHub identity)github-actions[bot] (CI, skeptic-cron)coderabbitai[bot] (code review)cursor[bot] (Bugbot)
If $USER (Jeffrey's personal account) or any other human/terminal identity appears as a PR actor, it's operator-assisted.
KPI
zero_touch_rate = (zero-touch merged PRs) / (total merged PRs) * 100
Measured weekly. Target: increasing trend.
Labeling (planned)
skeptic-cron.yml should label merged PRs as zero-touch or operator-assisted based on the actor audit. Not yet implemented — tracked in beads.
Reference
Full doc with HTML version: ~/.openclaw/docs/ZERO_TOUCH.md / ZERO_TOUCH.html
