# Repository Agent Guidance

## CodeWhale Stewardship

- Treat community contributors as partners. Good-faith PRs, issue reports,
  repros, logs, reviews, and verification comments are maintainer evidence,
  not queue noise.
- Keep gates warm and dry-run unless Hunter explicitly approves enforcement.
  Gate copy should guide contributors clearly and respectfully.
- Credit every harvested PR, issue report, or comment that materially shaped a
  fix. Preserve authorship when possible; otherwise use mappable GitHub
  noreply `Co-authored-by` trailers from `.github/AUTHOR_MAP`.
- Do not tag, publish, create a GitHub Release, or push release artifacts
  without Hunter approval.
- Use CodeWhale branding while keeping DeepSeek support first-class. Retiring
  legacy `deepseek-tui` names must never read as deprecating DeepSeek models or
  provider support.
- Review PRs from code, tests, linked issues, comments, and check results.
  Never merge, close, harvest, or defer community work from title or labels
  alone.
- Respect concurrent work in the tree. Do not revert or rewrite unrelated
  edits by other people or agents.

## Release PR Integration

- Use scratch integration branches when triaging a crowded release queue. A
  branch such as `scratch/v0.8.59-pr-train-YYYYMMDD` may merge or cherry-pick
  many PR heads to expose conflicts, missing tests, duplicate work, and hidden
  coupling quickly.
- Treat scratch branches as evidence, not as the artifact to ship. Do not tag,
  release, or fast-forward a release branch from a scratch train. Harvest the
  safe resolved hunks or commits back into the release branch in narrow,
  reviewable commits.
- Prefer direct GitHub merge only when the PR is clean against the real landing
  branch, has acceptable checks, and does not cross trust-boundary surfaces. A
  PR that is clean against `main` can still conflict with a release branch; test
  against the actual release head before calling it merge-ready.
- For already approved PRs, start with a scratch merge against the release
  branch, then decide between direct merge, cherry-pick with conflict
  resolution, or credited harvest. Maintainer approval is a priority signal,
  not permission to skip review or tests.
- When harvesting, preserve or add machine-readable credit: keep the original
  author where possible, add `Co-authored-by` using `.github/AUTHOR_MAP` or
  GitHub numeric noreply identity, and include `Harvested from PR #N by
  @handle` in the commit body so the auto-close workflow can close the PR with
  credit after it reaches `main`.
- Close or update issues and PRs only after verifying the landed commit on the
  relevant branch. If the release branch already contains equivalent behavior,
  leave a clear note linking the commit and describing any remaining delta.
- For the current v0.8.59 queue, use `docs/V0_8_59_RELEASE_TRIAGE.md` as the
  starting triage packet, then refresh GitHub state before acting.