merge-gate

name	merge-gate
description	Review inbound agent-shipped PRs at the merge gate — drift checklist, targeted live e2e, fix-in-place, review-bot iteration (Copilot + CodeRabbit) — leaving each PR merge-confident (gate-passed) or explicitly failed (gate-failed).
argument-hint	[pr-number]
disable-model-invocation	true
metadata	{"internal":true}

merge-gate

Take a PR that a shipping agent left at its merge gate and make it merge-confident: verified against the project's drift checklist, integration-tested live, scoped gaps fixed in place, and re-reviewed — so the maintainer's merge decision is a 10-second yes. The maintainer merges; this skill never does.

Inbound PRs come from several shipping streams (cloud-ship routine, codex, teammates' agents). Each has already run its own pipeline — tests, docs-sync, Copilot rounds — and stopped at the merge gate. This skill is the independent second gate: it assumes nothing the author agent claimed, and re-verifies.

Invocation

• /merge-gate <n> — gate one PR.
• /merge-gate — sweep: scripts/sweep-list.sh prints the queue (every open, non-draft PR carrying neither gate-passed nor gate-failed, oldest first); work it in order, one consolidated report at the end.

Scripts

scripts/ holds the gate's deterministic steps; each prints a one-screen summary and its exit code is the completion criterion. When a step names a script, run it instead of re-deriving the calls it wraps — scripts gather evidence and encode the traps; judging the evidence stays with you.

Every comment posted to the PR starts with:

> *This was generated by AI during merge-gate review.*

Per-PR flow

1 · Preflight

• Run scripts/gate-preflight.sh <n> — one JSON blob: PR meta + body, labels, linked issues, CI check runs, a pushed_last_15min flag, and the CodeRabbit threads left with no disposition (neither a fix nor a decline-with-evidence reply).
• Skip drafts and PRs with pushed_last_15min: true (the author agent may still be working); note the skip.
• Read the PR comments yourself: the author agent's merge summary and its per-reviewer dispositions (Copilot and CodeRabbit), plus the linked issue + brief. Each undispositioned CodeRabbit thread the script surfaced is a gap the author agent left — treat it as a review finding for step 3.
• Red CI or a merge conflict is fix item #1, not a blocker — the gate fixes in place.

2 · Checkout

Fetch the PR branch and check it out in a fresh worktree (git fetch origin <branch> + git worktree add); never in the shared checkout. All gate fixes are commits on the PR's own branch. Diff base for every check below: git diff origin/<default-branch>...HEAD.

3 · Review

Two layers, both against the diff:

1. Invoke the tracked code-review skill by name (Standards + Spec axes, its own per-axis tiers) — the two-axis pass is the review gate. Spec source: the linked issue + agent brief. A hand-rolled reviewer subagent is not a substitute; if the skill errors or seems missing, fix that and re-invoke rather than improvise around it.
2. The drift checklist — the seven repo-specific gates in reference/drift-checklist.md. Work through all seven; each ends in an explicit pass / fail / n-a with evidence. An unchecked item is a gap in the gate, not a pass.

Auto-triage findings with rigor: verify claims against pinned versions and current docs, harden rather than rip out capability, reject known non-issues with evidence. Every finding gets a one-line disposition for the verdict comment.

4 · Integration test

• D365-touching change → follow the live-e2e skill: run the PR's new/changed e2e tests plus the existing e2e tests for the touched command groups. scripts/select-e2e.sh maps the diff to the group test files and prints their @covers strings (@covers(...) stamps are a coverage registry, not pytest markers, so -k/-m cannot select on them) — confirm the touched verbs appear in those strings, then run D365_E2E=1 pytest -m e2e <files> (worktree-code recipe). Run on every live target the touched commands support — a single-target green has guessed the wrong capability gate before. Pin --profile, confirm the org via crm connection whoami, and quote both in the verdict. A target unreachable (VPN down, trial expired) is an explicit skip with reason, never a silent pass. Done = the full test_<group>*.py file(s) ran green on every supported target — the PR's own new test node passing alone is not the integration test.
• No D365 surface (docs, local groups, offline-provable refactor) → offline suite only; say so in the verdict.

5 · Fix in place

Fix scoped items directly on the PR branch: CI red, drift-checklist failures, valid review findings, missing docs-sync artifacts (use the project's docs-sync subagent for those). Re-run the project's local gate green before every push — the ship skill's scripts/local-gate.sh (sibling skill dir) runs the full CI-mirrored set and prints only the failing lines.

A design-level problem — wrong approach, contract change the issue never asked for, a diff that needs re-scoping — is a finding, not a fix: record it, label gate-failed, and escalate in the verdict. The gate polishes; it does not redesign someone else's PR.

6 · Review-bot iteration

Only when the gate pushed commits (nothing pushed → nothing new to review; skip — but CodeRabbit threads found undispositioned in preflight must still be triaged (step 3), fixed where valid (step 5), replied to on-thread, and bulk-resolved via @coderabbitai resolve before the verdict):

1. CodeRabbit owns iteration — it re-reviews each push automatically, no re-request needed (if it auto-paused, @coderabbitai review lifts the pause). Poll bounded, auto-triage its returned comments (same rigor as step 3), fix valid ones, push — the next round re-triggers on its own. Reply on each CodeRabbit thread ("fixed in <sha>" / decline + evidence); once every thread is dispositioned, @coderabbitai resolve closes them — never earlier (it bulk-resolves).
2. Copilot is round-1-only — with one gate exception. The gate may spend exactly one Copilot re-request, and only when it significantly rewrote the PR (a scoped lint/format/typo fix does not qualify). Otherwise Copilot's round-1 threads are dispositioned once, as in the ship flow. The exception is one per PR, not per gate run. Spend it via scripts/rerequest-copilot.sh <n> — it refuses when the re-request was already spent or is still pending (so a re-run or sweep can't re-enter this branch), uses the REST path with the exact bot login (the gh pr edit --add-reviewer path and the display name "Copilot" both fail on this repo), and verifies requested_reviewers actually populated — a bare HTTP 201 can silently no-op.
3. Converged = CodeRabbit quiet on the latest push + every Copilot thread dispositioned (declined-with-evidence counts as dispositioned). CodeRabbit's auto-rounds are free — drive them to quiet. If CodeRabbit stays substantive round after round, the PR has a shape problem more rounds won't fix → stop and fail the gate.

7 · Verdict

Post the verdict comment (reference/verdict.md) on the PR and set exactly one label: gate-passed (converged, all checklist items pass/n-a, live runs green where required) or gate-failed (unconverged, design-level finding, or an unfixable checklist failure — the comment says which and what the maintainer should decide).

8 · Issues surfaced — confirm in the verdict, then report

The gate is surface-only: it files nothing and touches no out-of-scope code (the same discipline step 5 applies to design-level findings). Its job is to make the issue trail explicit — so the verdict comment's Issues surfaced section, and the session report after it, both answer two questions:

• Filed during this PR — issues the author agent's notes or the PR body say it filed, plus any filed mid-gate. Link each by number.
• Needs filing — out-of-scope problems the review surfaced (adjacent bugs, debt, doc gaps beyond this PR) with no issue yet: one line + a suggested action each; the maintainer decides. State an explicit "none — nothing out-of-scope surfaced" when the trail is clean, so an empty section never reads as unchecked.

Report the same two lists in the session after the verdict (never before); the maintainer decides what gets filed or dispatched — file nothing yourself.

In a sweep, finish each PR's steps 1–7 before the next, then give one consolidated report: per-PR verdict line + the combined issues list.

Model tiers

Same rule as ship: judgment on the strong tier, mechanics on the cheap one — and no model at all where a script covers the step. Scripts gather the evidence (preflight, genericity scan, e2e selection); judge their output inline on the strong tier — an evidence-gathering subagent adds relay loss for nothing. File-mapping sweeps → haiku; running live tests and mechanical fixes → sonnet; finding triage and the drift checklist → opus (or nearest available). Tag every subagent explicitly.

Reference files

• reference/drift-checklist.md — the seven repo-specific gates with how to check each.
• reference/verdict.md — the verdict-comment template and label mechanics.