attest

name	attest
description	Behavioral gate split out of /qa. Runs fail-on-master/pass-on-fix, routes the card by verdict, and uses the kanban trail to decide 1st-fail (→ investigate) vs 2nd-fail (→ human). Hides the test gate from qa so adversarial pride can't tangle with "did the fix work?"
argument-hint	<repo> [--branch BRANCH]
allowed-tools	Read, Write, Bash

Attest

Verify the fix branch actually fixes the bug. Route the card downstream by outcome. Stop.

The skill is thin because the work is deterministic — sweep already owns test_attestation (fail-on-master, pass-on-fix). attest's job is routing, not LLM-shaped review. qa is the adversarial reviewer; attest is the gate.

Why split this out of qa

Hide the gate from the producer — pride is the failure mode. qa's identity is "I find structural and logic bugs." When qa also owned the test attestation, qa had a stake in the test outcome. Splitting attest out means qa receives a card that already passed the behavioral gate; qa can only opine on code quality, not on whether the fix works. Same shape as hiding attestations from the issue's reporter.

OTP shape

investigate.jsonl → [investigate-actor]
                         |
                  produces fix branch
                         |
                         v
                  attest.jsonl → [attest-actor] ─ pass ─→ qa.jsonl
                         ^                       │
                         |                       ├─ fail (1st) ─→ investigate.jsonl
                         └──── retry ────────────┘
                                                 └─ fail (2nd) ─→ human.jsonl

WIP=1, SkillActor (parameterized on attest_cycle). No new workflow class.

Monoidal contract

Input	Output	Valid alone?
Message{repo, branch, payload, path} on attest.jsonl	GateAttestation artifact on disk + one routed message (qa / investigate / human)	Yes — given a worktree, deterministic

• Identity: empty inbox → no-op.
• Composition: attest(attest(card)) for the same (branch, worktree HEAD) produces the same attestation_hash. The test runs once per (branch, SHA); a re-run with no commit movement reuses the cached artifact.
• Preconditions: msg.repo and msg.branch set. Worktree resolvable via ensure_worktree. infer_test_cmd returns a non-empty command for the repo.
• Postconditions: routed message lands on exactly one downstream inbox. On pass, downstream message payload carries attestation_hash. On fail, downstream message payload carries attest_failure_reason (stderr tail).

1st-fail vs 2nd-fail — kanban-as-counter

The Message.path field is the trail of senders this card has passed through. Each actor that forwards a card sets new.path = incoming.path + [incoming.sender]. So if attest is about to process a card whose path already contains "attest", this is at least the second time attest is seeing this card's lineage.

second_look = msg.path.count("attest") >= 1

• First look + fail → investigate.jsonl (one cheap LLM retry; the bounce-back carries the failure stderr in payload.attest_failure_reason so investigate isn't blind)
• Second look + fail → human.jsonl (operator decides: scrap, redirect, or hand-fix)

No per-card counter. No cross-inbox reads. The kanban remembers.

What attest does NOT do

• Adversarial code review. (/qa does, downstream, on the pass path only.)
• Decide whether the failure is "test wrong" vs "fix wrong" — that's investigate's job on the retry. attest just routes.
• Re-run the test on the qa side. (qa today still re-runs test_attestation as a defensive double-check; the attestation_hash in the payload is forwarded for future hash-based skip. Optimization, not correctness.)
• Halt the actor on a genuine test_fails_on_fix. That's a routable verdict. Halt is reserved for broken substrate (missing toolchain, master test passing, git checkout failure).

CLI

The harness owns the loop. Standalone invocation for debugging:

sweep attest run --repo owner/repo --branch fix-xyz

Equivalent to depositing one card on attest.jsonl and waiting for the actor to process it.

Output contract

attest_cycle returns:

{
  "verdict":   "pass | fail",
  "target":    "qa | investigate | human",
  "second_look": false,
  "attestation_hash": "sha256...",  // only when verdict=pass
  "msg_id":    "..."
}