codewhale/AGENTS.md

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.