Landing PRs

Many agent threads build and land PRs in parallel. Each thread owns its PR end to end: it verifies the PR, runs bounded review rounds, resolves its own conflicts, and merges.

Verify: a swarm breaks each PR

Agents verify behaviour by using it; a growing script suite is not the goal. Every gate added here slows every PR, so add none.

• A PR that changes Machine behaviour (daemon, Docker, WireGuard, ZFS, moves, deploys) sends a swarm of 2-3 agents before it goes ready. Each agent boots its own Boat (the verify-server skill, or core/scripts/verify-cluster) and tries to break the changed feature the way a real user would: the happy path, the edges, and what the change might break nearby. Give each agent a different angle. Agents drive the CLI and dashboard by hand; they write no scenario scripts.
• A swarm agent's report is the commands it ran and the end state it observed. A break it finds gets fixed in the PR, then the agent that found it reruns its angle.
• Put each agent's evidence in the PR body.
• A PR that leaves Machine behaviour alone skips Boat. Verify dashboard UI with the verify-dashboard skill.
• Merges run no scenario suite.
• Releases are Nick's job; agents leave them alone.

Review: bounded rounds

• Stop at the first round with no BUG-class finding.
• A finding is BUG-class when the PR leaves behaviour worse than main. File a defect that main already has as an issue, and keep it out of the PR.
• Only BUG-class findings start another round. Speculative, minor, style, and repeat findings get noted or dropped. A round starts for a known finding, never for what a reviewer might still find.
• When the same function needs its second fix, rewrite that function's whole contract before you patch it again.
• A large push during review restarts at round 1.
• CodeRabbit sits outside the gate. Change code only for a finding you accept on its merits.

Why the bound: across 45 PRs and 566 findings, 41% of real bugs came from earlier review fixes. Speculative findings rose from 24 in round 1 to 76 in round 3 and later. The Codex panel had a 60% real-bug rate; CodeRabbit had 11%.

Land

• Open PRs ready, not draft.
• Once review is clean, arm auto-merge: gh pr merge <n> --auto --merge. GitHub merges when the required "CI ready" check passes and the PR has no conflicts. The branch does not need to be up to date with main.
• Keep stacks short and merge each layer as soon as it is green. Ship unfinished work dark, behind a flag, in place of a tall stack.

Conflicts

• The thread that owns the PR resolves its conflicts. Enable rerere (git config rerere.enabled true) and rebase with git rebase --update-refs so every layer of a stack moves together.
• Registries are conflict hotspots: schema.ts, cli/mod.rs, handlers/mod.rs, change-log.sources.ts. Where the code allows, add one file per entry so parallel PRs touch different files.

Main is red

Revert the culprit first, then fix forward in a new PR.