| name | manta-merge-review |
| description | Guide for the main agent to interpret merge-review output and promote a winner from forking-realities casts |
| audience | main |
| version | 0.0.1 |
| related | ["manta-cast-decide","manta-as-clone"] |
manta-merge-review
Purpose
After a forking-realities cast completes and all clones are DEAD, the CLI automatically generates docs/merge-reviews/<castId>.md with a scored ranking of all candidates. This skill describes how the main agent reads the review, interprets scores, and promotes a winner.
Allowed
- Read merge-review documents from
docs/merge-reviews/<castId>.md.
- Override the scoring engine's recommendation when domain knowledge suggests the lower-scored candidate is better.
- Promote any clone in the roster, not just the top-ranked one.
- Inspect individual worktree branches before promoting to validate solution quality.
- Re-run merge-review if metrics look stale (e.g. after manual fixes in a worktree).
The merge-review document contains:
- Verdict —
auto_merge_eligible | manual_review_required | no_candidates_passed_gate | dominance_inversion_flagged.
- Score table — per-candidate normalized scores on 6 axes (coverage, diff, complexity, typeCheck, lint, perf) plus composite score.
- Disqualified section — candidates whose test suite failed.
- Tie-break explanation — axis priority → Pareto dominance → self-certainty → defer to main.
- Weight adjustments — agentic rubric pre-pass adjustments based on project config.
- Proposed merge command — the exact
git merge command.
Promote via /manta promote <castId>/<cloneId>. This merges the winner's branch (--no-ff), graveyards loser worktrees, removes the winner worktree, and emits a promote event.
Forbidden
- Auto-promoting without reading the review.
- Ignoring
dominance_inversion_flagged verdicts — they indicate weight mis-calibration.
- Promoting from a cast that has no merge-review event (the command will reject this).
Examples
A typical merge-review flow:
- Cast completes:
manta cast forking-realities --clones 3 --task "implement feature X".
- All clones die. CLI auto-generates
docs/merge-reviews/cast-123456.md.
- Read the review: clone B scores 0.82, clone A scores 0.79, clone C disqualified (test failure).
- Verify:
git diff main...manta/cast-123456/B — confirm the diff is sane.
- Promote:
/manta promote cast-123456/B.
- Result: B's branch merged, A's worktree moved to graveyard, C's worktree moved to graveyard.
