§2 said "never merge your own", written for people. Applied to an agent it
produced a contradiction that surfaced immediately: an agent asked to merge
cannot merge, because it authored what it is being asked to merge. So every
merge here was either performed by the thing that wrote it, or not performed.
Rejected the literal reading, because an operator clicking merge dozens of times
without reading is not a checkpoint — it is the SHAPE of one, which is worse,
since the record then claims a review that did not happen. Rejected dropping the
rule, because the failure it prevents is not one an agent is less prone to.
So the rule names what the checkpoint actually is: a person deciding, not a
person clicking. Work may be merged by whoever wrote it once a human has
explicitly approved that merge. What "explicit" excludes is the half that can
rot, so it is enumerated: a standing permission cited forever, an instruction to
do the work read as approval to merge it, silence, and the author's own
judgement that it is ready.
This narrows rather than relaxes. The obligation moves from who performs the
merge to whether a person decided — a higher bar in the case the old wording
permits, where a reviewer merges someone else's work without reading it.
Synced, and verified by reading the rule back out of the live page rather than
by trusting the publish.
