jschoubben
00d5ba8376
0042 becomes the operator's own rule and stops there: every merge into the main branch is notified and approved. Notified means proposed and said out loud, not performed and mentioned; approved means a person says yes to THAT merge. Who performs it is not the thing worth constraining, which is what makes an agent merging its own work unremarkable — the checkpoint already happened. 0043 answers the question it did not: where the ordered list comes from. By hand today, in substrate.lock, because the first node has no control plane to derive anything from. Afterwards the control plane derives it from module assignments, resolved configuration, and what each module declares it needs — ordered by the dependency graph, which is research 011. So the record is complete on the consumer side and deliberately silent on the producer side, and that is a legitimate order to settle them in: the host must refuse what it does not understand whoever wrote it. One consequence that only appeared when the question was asked: if the graph turns out not to determine a total order, that is 011's problem and not the host's. The host is still handed a list and still applies it as given. Recorded because it is the seam where a future difficulty would otherwise try to migrate into tier 0. Both were marked accepted before they had been read. Approved now, so the field is true — which it was not when it was written.
3.7 KiB
status, date, deciders, reconstructed
| status | date | deciders | reconstructed |
|---|---|---|---|
| accepted | 2026-08-26 | jochen | false |
42. The approval is the checkpoint, not the second pair of hands
Context
§2 reads "one change per pull request, and never merge your own", and gives the reason: "self-merging removes the checkpoint that is the entire point."
The rule was written for people. Applied literally to an agent it produces a contradiction that surfaced immediately: an agent asked to merge cannot merge, because it authored what it is being asked to merge. Every merge this repository has seen was therefore either performed by the thing that wrote it, or not performed at all.
Stated by the operator: "you are allowed to self-merge, after I've given you explicit approval."
Considered options
- Read it literally. An agent never merges; the operator merges by hand every time. Rejected: it makes the operator a mechanical step rather than a reviewer, and a step performed dozens of times without reading is not a checkpoint — it is the shape of one, which is worse, because the record then claims a review that did not happen.
- Drop the rule for agents. Rejected: the rule is right, and the failure it prevents — work merged with nobody having looked — is not one an agent is less prone to.
- Require notification and approval, and stop there. Chosen. Who performs the merge is not the thing worth constraining.
Decision
Every merge into the main branch is notified and approved. Stated by the operator in exactly those terms, and the whole of the rule.
Notified: the merge is proposed and said out loud, not performed and mentioned. Approved: a person says yes to that merge. Who then performs it does not matter, which is what makes an agent merging its own work unremarkable — the checkpoint already happened.
What approval is not, because this is the half that can rot:
- A standing permission granted once and cited forever.
- An instruction to do the work, read as approval to merge it.
- Silence.
- The author's own judgement that the work is ready.
Consequences
- The record must show which it was. A merge performed on approval and a merge performed unilaterally look identical afterwards, and the difference is the whole rule. Until the forge can record an approval, the merge commit says so — which is weaker than a recorded review and is stated here rather than left to be discovered.
- Branch protection would make this structural instead of textual. Required approvals turn the rule into something the forge enforces. It cannot be set through the API on the forge version in use, so this remains a rule held by intention — the condition §5 exists to name.
- The one-change-per-pull-request half is untouched, and was broken twice on 2026-08-26. Both breaches are recorded in the pull requests themselves rather than in a conversation.
- This narrows a rule rather than relaxing one. The obligation moves from who performs the merge to whether a person decided, which is a higher bar in the case the original wording actually permits: a reviewer who merges someone else's work without reading it satisfies the old rule and fails this one.
Sync
Run and verified 2026-08-26. §2 in the enforced page now reads never merge unapproved work, confirmed by reading the rule back out of the live page rather than by trusting the publish — the previous sync reported success and changed nothing.
References
how-we-build.md§2 — the rule, now carrying this.- ADR 0008 — the standard a checkpoint is held to: a step that reports success without doing anything is the fault, not the shortcut.