no-self-approve

name	no-self-approve
description	Never cast an approving review on a PR your own (shared) agent identity authored — approval must come from an independent reviewer.
triggers	["before voting / approving on a PR","reviewer or judge about to approve"]
allowed-tools	Bash Read Grep Glob

no-self-approve (principles 9, 10)

Harness agents often authenticate with one shared bot identity. Casting an approve on a PR that identity authored — including any harness-created PR on an agent/<id>/… branch — is a self-approval: invalid, because approval must come from an independent reviewer (another agent on the same identity cannot supply it either).

Rules

• Always post your review comments / findings — that work is valuable regardless of who authored the PR.
• Never cast an approving vote (approve / approve-with-suggestions) on a PR authored by your own identity. If your verdict is "approve" but you authored it, abstain and note that independent approval is required.
• Negative verdicts (request changes / reject) on your own PR are fine — you may always ask for changes to your own work.

How to check before approving

• Compare the PR author to your own identity. For GitHub: gh pr view <pr> --json author -q .author.login vs gh api user -q .login.
• If they match (or the branch is an agent/… branch you produced), do not approve — abstain.
• Prefer a deterministic pre_merge gate that rejects approver == author, so a slip can never merge. This skill is wired into pre_merge in the state machine.