zero-touch

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:

1. AO spawned the worker session autonomously (via ao spawn, lifecycle-worker, or poller)
2. The worker drove the PR to N-green (all applicable conditions) without external nudges
3. 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