feat(process): deterministic pre-flight for the PR review agent - #163
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Plans the deterministic pre-flight script for issue #116 — the stage that emits a machine-readable record of everything about a PR decidable without a model, so no later reviewer spends a token on a question with one correct answer. Twelve steps, first running at step 3. Two serina:review-plan passes ran before any of it is built; twelve findings, three of them Blockers, all applied. The Blockers were a GraphQL merge-base field that does not exist, a fixture set that could not distinguish a three-dot diff from a two-dot one, and an exit contract that was titled but never defined or tested. Written to launchpad/plans/ rather than the skill's default docs/plans/, because docs/ is upstream's tree and launchpad/AGENTS.md puts cohort files under launchpad/. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…inst Seventeen fixtures for #116, recorded from the live API by record.sh rather than written by hand. A hand-written fixture proves only that the code agrees with its author about the response shape. Three recorded facts differ from what the plan expected, and the controls follow the recording rather than the plan: - PR 86 now carries 47 checks with three named "check", not the 24 with two that the plan recorded a day earlier. Names collide harder than claimed, so the record must carry checks as a list. - Org-level rulesets answer 404, not 403, for a token without admin:org. launchpad-26 is an Organization, so that 404 hides access rather than reporting absence, and it cannot be read as "no rulesets exist". - PR 14 modifies root AGENTS.md and adds launchpad/AGENTS.md; the plan described both as additions. The ADD direction still has a real source. The DELETE direction has no real source in this fork or upstream, so it was recorded from throwaway PR #142, opened for the purpose and closed unmerged with its branch deleted. record-delete-fixture.sh is the audit trail. STEP 1's done-when is committed as eight controls rather than run once by hand, so a re-recording that drifts fails where the cause is legible. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
preflight_core.py for #116. No subprocess, no network and no model call in this module: every input arrives as a Read that somebody else performed, which is what makes the whole surface testable from recorded fixtures. The record's seven fields are enumerated in the module docstring, so a later change has a fixed list to be checked against rather than an open-ended "every field". checks is a list, never a name-keyed map — PR 86 carries three checks named "check" and a map would drop two of them. The SKIP taxonomy is six enumerated reasons, two more than the plan named: - truncated, because the trees API answers HTTP 200 with a partial list and a half-read tree reporting "no rules file" is the confusion the guard exists to prevent. - unreachable, because "we never asked" — no gh binary, a timeout — must not be reported as "it does not exist", which is what folding it into absent does. Re-recorded every compare fixture by SHA, base.sha...head.sha, after the first recording exposed a defect in itself: comparing a merged PR against its base BRANCH NAME answers 200 OK with zero files, because the branch tip already contains the head. A real six-file PR rendered as a PR that changed nothing. That re-recording also made PR 86 a stronger fixture than the plan expected. Its base tip is now 6 commits ahead of its merge base, so the two-dot trap is catchable on PR 86 itself, not only on the upstream divergent fixture. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
pr-preflight.py prints the record as JSON on stdout for #116. Verified against the live API: on PR 86 the title matches `gh pr view 86 --json title`, the record's sorted file paths are identical to `gh pr diff 86 --name-only | sort`, and a nonexistent PR number exits 2 having printed nothing on stdout, with the skip register on stderr. The runner is an injected argument defaulting to real gh. That is the whole reason the later controls can make each individual call fail without a network: hardcoding subprocess.run(["gh", ...]) per call site would have turned STEP 9 from test-writing into a rewrite of steps 3 through 7. The fetch layer lives in preflight_fetch.py rather than inside pr-preflight.py, because a module named pr-preflight cannot be imported, and a fetch layer no control can drive is a fetch layer no control can make fail. The CLI file is the entry point and nothing else. Fixed a misclassification the live run exposed: `gh pr view 999999` reports absence in prose — "GraphQL: Could not resolve to a PullRequest" — with no HTTP status attached, so it was being classified unreachable. That is precisely the confusion the taxonomy exists to prevent: we did ask, and the answer was that it is not there. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…t disagrees STEP 4 of #116, built the way Serina chose rather than the way the plan prescribed. The plan said to reuse launchpad-pr-check.yml's body regex. That is the mechanism sibling PR #126 is replacing as bug #125, and it is wrong in a way this record must not repeat. Probed against four real pull requests before deciding: - fork #92 — the body carries a visible `Closes #n` and GitHub reports NOTHING, because the PR's base was not the default branch. Merging it closes no issue, and a regex says the board updates. - fork #86 — closes TWO issues. The plan's `re.search` reports one. A control now reproduces the single search and requires the record to hold more than it. - upstream block#5695 — the only keyword sits in an unfilled `<!-- Fixes block#1234 -->` placeholder. GitHub ignores it; so does the text half, which strips comments first. - fork #124 — `Refs #116`, correctly not a closing reference. So closingIssuesReferences decides `present` and the issue list, the body still supplies which keyword was written, and a disagreement between them is recorded instead of resolved silently — a disagreement is the shape of #125 and is signal a reviewer wants. An unreadable GitHub answer yields `present: null` — unknown, never false. "We could not ask" and "it closes nothing" differ on whether the board updates, and closing_refs is therefore skip-only: the run still exits 0 carrying the skip. closing_issue grew from three fields to six, added to the module's enumerated field list in the same commit as the plan requires. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…xpose a two-dot one STEP 5 of #116. Six controls over the merge-base diff, and the one that matters is the divergent case: the recorded base SHA must equal merge_base_commit.sha and must NOT equal the PR's base tip. A two-dot implementation passes every other control in this file and fails that one. PR 86 now carries the property too — launchpad moved 19 commits under it, so its base tip sits 6 commits past its fork point — so the trap is covered by the fork's own PR as well as by the upstream fixture that was recorded for it. Verified live as the plan asks: the record's sorted file paths are identical to `gh pr diff 86 --repo launchpad-26/buzz --name-only | sort`, six paths, and the same six are asserted from the recorded fixture so the check survives without a network. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
… say why not STEP 6 of #116. On PR 86 all 47 checks report required false, repo-level rules for launchpad answer an empty list, and the record says configured: false naming the endpoint that answered — never a silent zero, which is indistinguishable from a scope failure. Org-level rulesets are unreadable without admin:org, which this token does not hold, so their absence is a published SKIP rather than an assertion that none exist. A control requires that skip to be present whenever configured is false, so the false can never be read alone. Documented the two blind spots that survive, because "configured: false" is a statement about what could be seen and not about what is: - an org ruleset is invisible to this token, and leaks through only via per-context isRequired, which is why that is consulted as a second source; - a required context that never RAN is absent from the rollup entirely, so isRequired cannot report it either. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…the worktree STEP 7 of #116. Nine controls. Both AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md are resolved independently, because first-wins would hide the root CLAUDE.md from every path under launchpad/, which has only an AGENTS.md. The two controls that could fail for a resolver that looks like it works: - the DELETE direction. launchpad/AGENTS.md is on disk in this checkout, and the throwaway PR's head tree does not have it. A resolver reading the local checkout answers launchpad/AGENTS.md; reading the head tree answers the root file. The control asserts the local file really is present first, so it cannot pass by the file being missing. - a tree naming a directory that exists nowhere on disk still resolves, which no filesystem-reading implementation can do. Also pinned: the nearest ancestor wins over a further one (desktop/src/features/agents/AGENTS.md over the root), a lookalike basename is not a rules file (VISION_REMOTE_AGENTS.md ends with AGENTS.md), and a path with no ancestor rules file at all is a skip-only fact that keeps the exit at 0. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
STEP 8 of #116. Nine controls break exactly one call at a time, leaving the other seven working, which is the only way to show that *this* input is the one whose failure is fatal — and, for the skip-only ones, that it is not. All five required inputs and all three skip-only ones are covered, plus a control that every one of the six enumerated reasons is reachable. Writing them exposed two defects in what came before: - An empty-but-readable check list was fatal. A head commit whose checks have not started yet is READ, and empty; treating that as a failure is the same conflation as treating an unreadable check list as "no checks are required", pointed the other way. `empty` is now never fatal for any field, and that rule outranks the required/skip-only split. - A usage error and an unreadable required input both exited 2, because argparse exits 2 on error and the documented contract claimed 1. Two very different failures sharing an exit code makes the contract untestable — the control that was supposed to tell them apart passed while asserting they were the same. Usage errors now exit 1, verified live: `pr-preflight.py 0` exits 1, and `pr-preflight.py 999999` exits 2. A truncated head tree exits non-zero and resolves to None rather than {} — not read is not the same as nothing found, and {} is what would let a half-read tree publish as "this path has no rules file". Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
STEP 9 of #116. Six record fields, three degradations each — empty, malformed, erroring — with the runner injected and no network anywhere. The seventh field, skips, is the register the other six report into and has no read of its own, so it gets its own controls instead of a row in the matrix. No grep could do this. A grep reports every occurrence and leaves a human to sort the legitimate hits from the real ones, which is not a check that can fail. The matrix found a real defect: a malformed rules probe was coerced to an empty list, so `configured: false` — a definite answer — was published from a response nobody could read. It now reports malformed and configured: null. Two fields where an EMPTY answer is a real answer rather than a skip, each named in the suite with its reason rather than smoothed into false uniformity: an empty rules list means no gate is configured, and GitHub answering with no closing references means the PR closes nothing. Also added: a head tree listing zero entries is now a skip, because it cannot be reconciled with a diff that changed files, and resolving every path to "no rules file" against it would be an empty read publishing itself as an answer. Three controls assert the no-network property from different angles: subprocess is broken outright and the whole CLI still runs, the real runner refuses any binary but gh, and exactly eight reads are made with no call repeated. The suite is discovered with `-t launchpad/scripts`, not the plan's `-t .`. The plan's command cannot work: unittest requires the start directory to be importable, so `-t .` needs __init__.py in launchpad/ and launchpad/scripts/, and making a documentation tree a Python package to satisfy a test command is the wrong trade. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
… go red STEP 10 of #116. A control that has never been observed failing has not been shown to test anything, and "the suite passes" is the claim this harness exists to refuse. Twenty functions across preflight_core.py and preflight_fetch.py, each replaced in turn by a constant chosen to be the plausible wrong answer a careless implementation would return — build_checks to [], build_nearest_rules to {}, is_fatal to False, gh_runner to a canned success. 20 of 20 mutants killed; the raw run goes in the PR body as the plan asks. The harness restores each file from the original held in memory and then verifies the restoration byte-for-byte before exiting, because a mutation harness that leaves a mutant in the tree is worse than none. It also refuses to start if the suite is already red, so a survivor can never be a pre-existing failure misattributed to a mutation. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…eck refusing STEP 11 of #116. Every imported module name in both modules is compared against an allowlist written in the test, so an import nobody anticipated fails the check by default. A grep cannot do this: it reports every occurrence and leaves a human to sort the legitimate hits from the real ones, which is not a check that can fail. Three evasions are closed, each demonstrated on a sample rather than asserted: - ast.walk, not tree.body — a top-level scan finds {json} in a module that also does `import requests` inside a function, where walk finds both. - Call nodes too — `importlib.import_module("openai")` creates no Import node, so an import-name scan reports it as absent. - `__import__("openai")` needs no import statement at all. The check lives in its own module, test_no_model.py, and reads the source rather than importing it. That is what makes the evidence honest: httpx, openai and anthropic are not installed here, so injecting one into preflight_core makes every module that imports it die at import time — and a suite that is red because a module could not load is not evidence that this check works. The harness's injection phase confirms it, 13 of 13 refused: urllib.request, requests, httpx, openai and anthropic at module level; requests, openai and httpx inside function bodies; importlib.import_module and __import__ by call; and two injections into the fetch layer. Raw output in the PR body. Writing this caught a control failing in the way the module argues against: it counted "subprocess.run(" as text and read its own prose about subprocess as a second spawn site. It now counts call nodes, and requires the one spawn to sit inside gh_runner. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…y resolves INTERFACE.md for #116, so #117, #118 and #119 have something to depend on that is not the source. The three rules a consumer can rely on: null means "not read" and never "nothing there"; every null field has a skip entry naming the endpoint that answered; and exit 2 leaves stdout empty so there is no half-record to mistake for a whole one. #120's CONTAINMENT.md names #116 in its contract table: must call fetch.fetch_all, must never concatenate surfaces or build a prompt. Both halves are addressed rather than assumed. The "must never" half holds today — every author-controlled surface is a separately labelled JSON string, nothing is concatenated, no prompt exists, and the AST controls keep the record module unable to reach a model at all. The "must call" half cannot hold yet: fetch.fetch_all is on an unmerged branch, importing it is impossible and copying it would create the second copy this work was told not to make. It resolves by rebase after #120 merges, and the injected runner is already the seam that makes adopting their fetcher an adapter rather than a rewrite. Also raised for the reviewer: #120 put its tree at launchpad/review-agent/ while this plan assumed launchpad/scripts/, where PR #126 is also adding a script. They should not stay split, and which way they converge is not this PR's call. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…nfirmed Nine findings went in, seven confirmed, one refuted, two merged. All fixed, and the refuted one hardened anyway. #116. HIGH — the org-rulesets 404-to-forbidden reclassification was never asserted. Deleting it left 80/80 green, because the three controls named for that property hand-built a Read with skip=FORBIDDEN already baked into it. A control that asserts an answer it supplied itself tests nothing, and one of those controls is called test_org_rulesets_are_skipped_not_asserted_absent. The fake runner was already feeding the real 404 text; now a control reads the reason back out of the record. MEDIUM — gh_runner caught FileNotFoundError and TimeoutExpired only, so any other OSError escaped main() and exited 1 with a traceback: this tool's usage-error code, telling a caller its arguments were bad. Three reproduced triggers, none of them a missing binary — a non-executable gh, a directory named gh, and a gh that is executable but not a runnable binary (wrong architecture or truncated download, the plausible one). Now every OSError is unreachable, and the run exits 2. A non-executable gh with a working one later on PATH was always harmless: CPython keeps walking PATH past EACCES. MEDIUM — the 5xx-to-unreachable branch was untested. Only a 5xx carrying a JSON message reaches it; a bodyless one prints no (HTTP nnn) and lands on the fallback. Both forms now have controls, because "retry" and "the shape is unusable" are different instructions to a consumer. MEDIUM — the in-band GraphQL errors block was dead code with a comment asserting a gh behaviour that does not happen: gh exits non-zero whenever a response carries errors, so absence arrives as prose and is already classified correctly. Kept, because the injected runner is a documented extension point and a direct HTTP caller does return 200 with an errors body — but the comment now says so, both halves have controls, and the error type maps to its own reason instead of everything but FORBIDDEN collapsing to malformed. LOW — a git directory or submodule named AGENTS.md resolved as a rules file, suppressing the "no ancestor rules file" skip that was the truth. Blobs only now; an entry with no recorded type is still kept, so a projection cannot drop a file. LOW — Skips.reasons() had no caller and no test. Deleted. REFUTED — diff.head_sha null with no skip cannot reach an emitted record: every route that loses the head sha already exits 2. Hardened regardless, because build_diff is a public function INTERFACE.md invites the next stage to call: it takes the head sha directly and skips without one, so the invariant lives in the function rather than in caller discipline. The harness gained the phase that would have caught three of these. Whole-function mutation cannot see a MISSING branch — it fails everything indiscriminately, which proves the function is called and nothing about any decision inside it. Thirteen branches are now disabled one at a time, and a snippet that no longer matches is a hard error rather than a silent pass. TARGETS also gained the three functions the adjudicator found absent despite the docstring's every-function claim, which is now stated accurately. 103 controls, 23/23 mutants killed, 13/13 branches checked, 13/13 forbidden imports refused. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
Plans the deterministic pre-flight script for issue #116 — the stage that emits a machine-readable record of everything about a PR decidable without a model, so no later reviewer spends a token on a question with one correct answer. Twelve steps, first running at step 3. Two serina:review-plan passes ran before any of it is built; twelve findings, three of them Blockers, all applied. The Blockers were a GraphQL merge-base field that does not exist, a fixture set that could not distinguish a three-dot diff from a two-dot one, and an exit contract that was titled but never defined or tested. Written to launchpad/plans/ rather than the skill's default docs/plans/, because docs/ is upstream's tree and launchpad/AGENTS.md puts cohort files under launchpad/. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…inst Seventeen fixtures for #116, recorded from the live API by record.sh rather than written by hand. A hand-written fixture proves only that the code agrees with its author about the response shape. Three recorded facts differ from what the plan expected, and the controls follow the recording rather than the plan: - PR 86 now carries 47 checks with three named "check", not the 24 with two that the plan recorded a day earlier. Names collide harder than claimed, so the record must carry checks as a list. - Org-level rulesets answer 404, not 403, for a token without admin:org. launchpad-26 is an Organization, so that 404 hides access rather than reporting absence, and it cannot be read as "no rulesets exist". - PR 14 modifies root AGENTS.md and adds launchpad/AGENTS.md; the plan described both as additions. The ADD direction still has a real source. The DELETE direction has no real source in this fork or upstream, so it was recorded from throwaway PR #142, opened for the purpose and closed unmerged with its branch deleted. record-delete-fixture.sh is the audit trail. STEP 1's done-when is committed as eight controls rather than run once by hand, so a re-recording that drifts fails where the cause is legible. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
preflight_core.py for #116. No subprocess, no network and no model call in this module: every input arrives as a Read that somebody else performed, which is what makes the whole surface testable from recorded fixtures. The record's seven fields are enumerated in the module docstring, so a later change has a fixed list to be checked against rather than an open-ended "every field". checks is a list, never a name-keyed map — PR 86 carries three checks named "check" and a map would drop two of them. The SKIP taxonomy is six enumerated reasons, two more than the plan named: - truncated, because the trees API answers HTTP 200 with a partial list and a half-read tree reporting "no rules file" is the confusion the guard exists to prevent. - unreachable, because "we never asked" — no gh binary, a timeout — must not be reported as "it does not exist", which is what folding it into absent does. Re-recorded every compare fixture by SHA, base.sha...head.sha, after the first recording exposed a defect in itself: comparing a merged PR against its base BRANCH NAME answers 200 OK with zero files, because the branch tip already contains the head. A real six-file PR rendered as a PR that changed nothing. That re-recording also made PR 86 a stronger fixture than the plan expected. Its base tip is now 6 commits ahead of its merge base, so the two-dot trap is catchable on PR 86 itself, not only on the upstream divergent fixture. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
pr-preflight.py prints the record as JSON on stdout for #116. Verified against the live API: on PR 86 the title matches `gh pr view 86 --json title`, the record's sorted file paths are identical to `gh pr diff 86 --name-only | sort`, and a nonexistent PR number exits 2 having printed nothing on stdout, with the skip register on stderr. The runner is an injected argument defaulting to real gh. That is the whole reason the later controls can make each individual call fail without a network: hardcoding subprocess.run(["gh", ...]) per call site would have turned STEP 9 from test-writing into a rewrite of steps 3 through 7. The fetch layer lives in preflight_fetch.py rather than inside pr-preflight.py, because a module named pr-preflight cannot be imported, and a fetch layer no control can drive is a fetch layer no control can make fail. The CLI file is the entry point and nothing else. Fixed a misclassification the live run exposed: `gh pr view 999999` reports absence in prose — "GraphQL: Could not resolve to a PullRequest" — with no HTTP status attached, so it was being classified unreachable. That is precisely the confusion the taxonomy exists to prevent: we did ask, and the answer was that it is not there. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…t disagrees STEP 4 of #116, built the way Serina chose rather than the way the plan prescribed. The plan said to reuse launchpad-pr-check.yml's body regex. That is the mechanism sibling PR #126 is replacing as bug #125, and it is wrong in a way this record must not repeat. Probed against four real pull requests before deciding: - fork #92 — the body carries a visible `Closes #n` and GitHub reports NOTHING, because the PR's base was not the default branch. Merging it closes no issue, and a regex says the board updates. - fork #86 — closes TWO issues. The plan's `re.search` reports one. A control now reproduces the single search and requires the record to hold more than it. - upstream block#5695 — the only keyword sits in an unfilled `<!-- Fixes block#1234 -->` placeholder. GitHub ignores it; so does the text half, which strips comments first. - fork #124 — `Refs #116`, correctly not a closing reference. So closingIssuesReferences decides `present` and the issue list, the body still supplies which keyword was written, and a disagreement between them is recorded instead of resolved silently — a disagreement is the shape of #125 and is signal a reviewer wants. An unreadable GitHub answer yields `present: null` — unknown, never false. "We could not ask" and "it closes nothing" differ on whether the board updates, and closing_refs is therefore skip-only: the run still exits 0 carrying the skip. closing_issue grew from three fields to six, added to the module's enumerated field list in the same commit as the plan requires. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…xpose a two-dot one STEP 5 of #116. Six controls over the merge-base diff, and the one that matters is the divergent case: the recorded base SHA must equal merge_base_commit.sha and must NOT equal the PR's base tip. A two-dot implementation passes every other control in this file and fails that one. PR 86 now carries the property too — launchpad moved 19 commits under it, so its base tip sits 6 commits past its fork point — so the trap is covered by the fork's own PR as well as by the upstream fixture that was recorded for it. Verified live as the plan asks: the record's sorted file paths are identical to `gh pr diff 86 --repo launchpad-26/buzz --name-only | sort`, six paths, and the same six are asserted from the recorded fixture so the check survives without a network. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
… say why not STEP 6 of #116. On PR 86 all 47 checks report required false, repo-level rules for launchpad answer an empty list, and the record says configured: false naming the endpoint that answered — never a silent zero, which is indistinguishable from a scope failure. Org-level rulesets are unreadable without admin:org, which this token does not hold, so their absence is a published SKIP rather than an assertion that none exist. A control requires that skip to be present whenever configured is false, so the false can never be read alone. Documented the two blind spots that survive, because "configured: false" is a statement about what could be seen and not about what is: - an org ruleset is invisible to this token, and leaks through only via per-context isRequired, which is why that is consulted as a second source; - a required context that never RAN is absent from the rollup entirely, so isRequired cannot report it either. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…the worktree STEP 7 of #116. Nine controls. Both AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md are resolved independently, because first-wins would hide the root CLAUDE.md from every path under launchpad/, which has only an AGENTS.md. The two controls that could fail for a resolver that looks like it works: - the DELETE direction. launchpad/AGENTS.md is on disk in this checkout, and the throwaway PR's head tree does not have it. A resolver reading the local checkout answers launchpad/AGENTS.md; reading the head tree answers the root file. The control asserts the local file really is present first, so it cannot pass by the file being missing. - a tree naming a directory that exists nowhere on disk still resolves, which no filesystem-reading implementation can do. Also pinned: the nearest ancestor wins over a further one (desktop/src/features/agents/AGENTS.md over the root), a lookalike basename is not a rules file (VISION_REMOTE_AGENTS.md ends with AGENTS.md), and a path with no ancestor rules file at all is a skip-only fact that keeps the exit at 0. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
STEP 8 of #116. Nine controls break exactly one call at a time, leaving the other seven working, which is the only way to show that *this* input is the one whose failure is fatal — and, for the skip-only ones, that it is not. All five required inputs and all three skip-only ones are covered, plus a control that every one of the six enumerated reasons is reachable. Writing them exposed two defects in what came before: - An empty-but-readable check list was fatal. A head commit whose checks have not started yet is READ, and empty; treating that as a failure is the same conflation as treating an unreadable check list as "no checks are required", pointed the other way. `empty` is now never fatal for any field, and that rule outranks the required/skip-only split. - A usage error and an unreadable required input both exited 2, because argparse exits 2 on error and the documented contract claimed 1. Two very different failures sharing an exit code makes the contract untestable — the control that was supposed to tell them apart passed while asserting they were the same. Usage errors now exit 1, verified live: `pr-preflight.py 0` exits 1, and `pr-preflight.py 999999` exits 2. A truncated head tree exits non-zero and resolves to None rather than {} — not read is not the same as nothing found, and {} is what would let a half-read tree publish as "this path has no rules file". Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
STEP 9 of #116. Six record fields, three degradations each — empty, malformed, erroring — with the runner injected and no network anywhere. The seventh field, skips, is the register the other six report into and has no read of its own, so it gets its own controls instead of a row in the matrix. No grep could do this. A grep reports every occurrence and leaves a human to sort the legitimate hits from the real ones, which is not a check that can fail. The matrix found a real defect: a malformed rules probe was coerced to an empty list, so `configured: false` — a definite answer — was published from a response nobody could read. It now reports malformed and configured: null. Two fields where an EMPTY answer is a real answer rather than a skip, each named in the suite with its reason rather than smoothed into false uniformity: an empty rules list means no gate is configured, and GitHub answering with no closing references means the PR closes nothing. Also added: a head tree listing zero entries is now a skip, because it cannot be reconciled with a diff that changed files, and resolving every path to "no rules file" against it would be an empty read publishing itself as an answer. Three controls assert the no-network property from different angles: subprocess is broken outright and the whole CLI still runs, the real runner refuses any binary but gh, and exactly eight reads are made with no call repeated. The suite is discovered with `-t launchpad/scripts`, not the plan's `-t .`. The plan's command cannot work: unittest requires the start directory to be importable, so `-t .` needs __init__.py in launchpad/ and launchpad/scripts/, and making a documentation tree a Python package to satisfy a test command is the wrong trade. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
… go red STEP 10 of #116. A control that has never been observed failing has not been shown to test anything, and "the suite passes" is the claim this harness exists to refuse. Twenty functions across preflight_core.py and preflight_fetch.py, each replaced in turn by a constant chosen to be the plausible wrong answer a careless implementation would return — build_checks to [], build_nearest_rules to {}, is_fatal to False, gh_runner to a canned success. 20 of 20 mutants killed; the raw run goes in the PR body as the plan asks. The harness restores each file from the original held in memory and then verifies the restoration byte-for-byte before exiting, because a mutation harness that leaves a mutant in the tree is worse than none. It also refuses to start if the suite is already red, so a survivor can never be a pre-existing failure misattributed to a mutation. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…eck refusing STEP 11 of #116. Every imported module name in both modules is compared against an allowlist written in the test, so an import nobody anticipated fails the check by default. A grep cannot do this: it reports every occurrence and leaves a human to sort the legitimate hits from the real ones, which is not a check that can fail. Three evasions are closed, each demonstrated on a sample rather than asserted: - ast.walk, not tree.body — a top-level scan finds {json} in a module that also does `import requests` inside a function, where walk finds both. - Call nodes too — `importlib.import_module("openai")` creates no Import node, so an import-name scan reports it as absent. - `__import__("openai")` needs no import statement at all. The check lives in its own module, test_no_model.py, and reads the source rather than importing it. That is what makes the evidence honest: httpx, openai and anthropic are not installed here, so injecting one into preflight_core makes every module that imports it die at import time — and a suite that is red because a module could not load is not evidence that this check works. The harness's injection phase confirms it, 13 of 13 refused: urllib.request, requests, httpx, openai and anthropic at module level; requests, openai and httpx inside function bodies; importlib.import_module and __import__ by call; and two injections into the fetch layer. Raw output in the PR body. Writing this caught a control failing in the way the module argues against: it counted "subprocess.run(" as text and read its own prose about subprocess as a second spawn site. It now counts call nodes, and requires the one spawn to sit inside gh_runner. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…y resolves INTERFACE.md for #116, so #117, #118 and #119 have something to depend on that is not the source. The three rules a consumer can rely on: null means "not read" and never "nothing there"; every null field has a skip entry naming the endpoint that answered; and exit 2 leaves stdout empty so there is no half-record to mistake for a whole one. #120's CONTAINMENT.md names #116 in its contract table: must call fetch.fetch_all, must never concatenate surfaces or build a prompt. Both halves are addressed rather than assumed. The "must never" half holds today — every author-controlled surface is a separately labelled JSON string, nothing is concatenated, no prompt exists, and the AST controls keep the record module unable to reach a model at all. The "must call" half cannot hold yet: fetch.fetch_all is on an unmerged branch, importing it is impossible and copying it would create the second copy this work was told not to make. It resolves by rebase after #120 merges, and the injected runner is already the seam that makes adopting their fetcher an adapter rather than a rewrite. Also raised for the reviewer: #120 put its tree at launchpad/review-agent/ while this plan assumed launchpad/scripts/, where PR #126 is also adding a script. They should not stay split, and which way they converge is not this PR's call. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…nfirmed Nine findings went in, seven confirmed, one refuted, two merged. All fixed, and the refuted one hardened anyway. #116. HIGH — the org-rulesets 404-to-forbidden reclassification was never asserted. Deleting it left 80/80 green, because the three controls named for that property hand-built a Read with skip=FORBIDDEN already baked into it. A control that asserts an answer it supplied itself tests nothing, and one of those controls is called test_org_rulesets_are_skipped_not_asserted_absent. The fake runner was already feeding the real 404 text; now a control reads the reason back out of the record. MEDIUM — gh_runner caught FileNotFoundError and TimeoutExpired only, so any other OSError escaped main() and exited 1 with a traceback: this tool's usage-error code, telling a caller its arguments were bad. Three reproduced triggers, none of them a missing binary — a non-executable gh, a directory named gh, and a gh that is executable but not a runnable binary (wrong architecture or truncated download, the plausible one). Now every OSError is unreachable, and the run exits 2. A non-executable gh with a working one later on PATH was always harmless: CPython keeps walking PATH past EACCES. MEDIUM — the 5xx-to-unreachable branch was untested. Only a 5xx carrying a JSON message reaches it; a bodyless one prints no (HTTP nnn) and lands on the fallback. Both forms now have controls, because "retry" and "the shape is unusable" are different instructions to a consumer. MEDIUM — the in-band GraphQL errors block was dead code with a comment asserting a gh behaviour that does not happen: gh exits non-zero whenever a response carries errors, so absence arrives as prose and is already classified correctly. Kept, because the injected runner is a documented extension point and a direct HTTP caller does return 200 with an errors body — but the comment now says so, both halves have controls, and the error type maps to its own reason instead of everything but FORBIDDEN collapsing to malformed. LOW — a git directory or submodule named AGENTS.md resolved as a rules file, suppressing the "no ancestor rules file" skip that was the truth. Blobs only now; an entry with no recorded type is still kept, so a projection cannot drop a file. LOW — Skips.reasons() had no caller and no test. Deleted. REFUTED — diff.head_sha null with no skip cannot reach an emitted record: every route that loses the head sha already exits 2. Hardened regardless, because build_diff is a public function INTERFACE.md invites the next stage to call: it takes the head sha directly and skips without one, so the invariant lives in the function rather than in caller discipline. The harness gained the phase that would have caught three of these. Whole-function mutation cannot see a MISSING branch — it fails everything indiscriminately, which proves the function is called and nothing about any decision inside it. Thirteen branches are now disabled one at a time, and a snippet that no longer matches is a hard error rather than a silent pass. TARGETS also gained the three functions the adjudicator found absent despite the docstring's every-function claim, which is now stated accurately. 103 controls, 23/23 mutants killed, 13/13 branches checked, 13/13 forbidden imports refused. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
Both High findings from the final branch review, on a branch now rebased onto launchpad. #116. HIGH — the record asked eight questions and none of them was the one readable question about the gate. launchpad/AGENTS.md §6 was rewritten by merged PR #126: the launchpad branch requires at least two approving reviews, the ruleset enforcing that is invisible without admin:org — three endpoints report nothing — and a live PR's reviewDecision confirms review IS required without exposing the count. This record published `configured: false` and never asked. On a branch that needs two approvals, that told #119 and #121 nothing gates it, with the evidence one call away: the governing property of this whole stage, broken by the stage itself. There are two gates, so the record now asks about both. `configured` answers "is a required STATUS CHECK visible"; `review_required` answers "is a REVIEW gate in force". The count is not inferred — reviewDecision does not carry it and §6's figure could drift. required_gate grew from two keys to five, added to the enumerated field list in the same commit. The stale §6 quotation in the docstring is replaced by what §6 says now. Two recorded fixtures, because the signal genuinely differs by base: PR 86 on launchpad answers REVIEW_REQUIRED, PR 92 on a topic branch answers "" — gh renders a GraphQL null as an empty string, so "" means "not required" and treating it as unrecognised would turn a readable answer into a malformed one. HIGH — the no-model AST check named two files and pr-preflight.py was not one of them, for three commits, while the suite reported the property as proved. An inference call in the entry point — the file the issue calls "the script" and the first one a reader opens — left all controls green. The files to check are now enumerated from the directory, so a new pre-flight module fails closed instead of going unchecked; the allowlist itself stays hand-written, because that is what makes an unanticipated import fail. Scoped to this stage's files: #126's pr_body_check.py shares the directory and its imports are not this suite's to police. MEDIUM, and the rebase is what made it real — the harness discovered all of launchpad/scripts, which now holds #126's suite. Plain discovery there runs 156 tests, not this stage's 112. A regression in a module this branch does not own would abort the harness and be reported as the pre-flight's; worse, a red foreign control would let every pre-flight mutant register as "killed" while proving nothing. SUITE and NO_MODEL_ONLY now name this stage's two test modules. Rebased onto launchpad: 0 behind, 15 ahead, all 15 DCO-signed. 112 own controls (156 with #126's), 24/24 mutants killed, 15/15 branches checked, 15/15 forbidden imports refused — the two new injections being the entry point ones that would have caught the second finding. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…for them The final branch review left eight non-blocking findings. Six were one-line corrections inside files this PR is still adding, so they are fixed here: filing an issue to correct a docstring and then merging the wrong docstring is worse than fixing it. The seventh is #148, because it needs a real StatusContext response that no PR in either repository currently carries. The eighth cannot be fixed retroactively — the plan's GATES ordering was not held — and stays disclosed in the PR body. Two docstrings that misstated their own evidence: - preflight_core said PR 86's body writes one `Closes #79`. It writes two, on consecutive lines; the under-reporting belongs to the plan's `re.search`, which a control reproduces. As written it argued that the body-regex mechanism was unfixable, weakening a decision whose real support is PR 92 and #125. - fetch_all's own docstring said "seven reads" and was stale twice over — the module header and a control both say nine. Read.name was written at 24 sites and read at none, so a skip entry silently dropped which read failed: build_pr reports under "pr" when `meta` is what broke. Skip entries now carry `source`, added to the record's enumerated field list in the same commit, with a control asserting source != field on exactly that case. The mutation harness promised a byte-for-byte restore verification that only its first phase performed. Two phases were added later and neither verified, in a tool that rewrites tracked source. All three now restore through one helper that checks its own work. record-delete-fixture.sh compared by branch name — the exact recording error README.md and record.sh both name, which once produced an empty file list for a real six-file PR. It reads base.sha now. The committed fixture was always sound; the script's own call was dead output. The plan's OPEN section said #110 is open. #110 decided 45 minutes after that file was committed, and its comment names #116's workflow invocation among what it unblocks. The plan merges and a PR body does not, so the correction belongs in the file. 113 own controls (157 with #126's), 24/24 mutants killed, 15/15 branches checked, 15/15 forbidden imports refused. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…he rebased tree The branch was rebased onto launchpad, so its history diverged from what was already pushed and only a force-push could reconcile them. §6 says not to force-push during review, and the safety hook enforces it, so this merge takes the other road: it makes the pushed tip an ancestor of this branch, and an ordinary push then fast-forwards. Strategy `ours` keeps this branch's tree byte-for-byte and discards the old tip's, which is safe here for a reason that was checked rather than assumed: every commit in f270512 was replayed by the rebase, `git diff f270512 HEAD` reports no deleted file and no removed-only content, and this tree carries all of it plus the two review-fix commits and launchpad's 20 intervening commits. No file content changes in this commit. The tree is identical to the commit before it, which is the property that makes the strategy honest. Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
Two claims in a committed contract document that no longer reproduced: the suite counts moved to 113 and 157 when the review fixes landed, and skip entries gained `source` — which read of the eight failed, as distinct from which record field lost a value. A document stating a number a reader cannot reproduce is the same defect class this stage exists to prevent, one level up: an assertion that has stopped being checked. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
…hpad Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
Two High, five Medium, four Low. #116. HIGH — the check list was capped at first:100 and totalCount, the field that would say so, was fetched and read by nothing. A PR with more than a hundred contexts would have published the first page as the whole list, with no skip and exit 0, and required_gate.configured is computed from that list — so a required check past the boundary read as "no gate configured". This is the exact shape the truncated reason exists for on the trees API, with the detecting value already in hand. It now fails closed. One correction to the review that found it: its reproduction reported "totalCount says 120" against the real fixture. The fixture and the live API both report 47 contexts and totalCount 47, verified twice. The defect is real and latent, not observed — and a control now pins that PR 86 is genuinely un-truncated, so the guard cannot be mistaken for one that never had a case. HIGH — the unreadable-branch_rules return dropped the three review_* keys every other return spreads. A consumer written to INTERFACE.md's five-key contract got a KeyError whenever the rules probe 403s, while the run exited 0 — the one failure "null means not read" cannot express, because the key was absent rather than null. The control that was supposed to cover this asserted `configured` alone. MEDIUM — checks were unpinned to any commit while build_diff refuses to return without a head sha. The rollup is reached through commits(last:1), resolved server-side at its own moment, and its oid was fetched and dropped. A push between the two reads gave a diff for commit A and checks for commit B with nothing able to say so. They must now agree. MEDIUM — "enumerated from the directory" was a hand-written list wearing a filename prefix: a stage module not called preflight* escaped discovery, the allowlist and the no-model check entirely. Discovery is by exclusion now — a new file is ours until someone names it otherwise here, with a reason — and a control creates an unanticipated module to prove it fails closed. MEDIUM — the controls ran nowhere. Deferring CI to #119 was right for a live pre-flight run and wrong for the suite: it needs no token and no network, proved under `env -i` with no HOME and no GH_TOKEN, 165 tests green. #126 had already built the workflow it belongs in. The mutation harness runs there too, because 24/24 in a PR body is a claim and not a gate. MEDIUM — the PR body moved out of launchpad/plans/. Committing it there answered the plan's own reserved question ("whether plans belong in this repository at all is unresolved... one git rm either way") by accumulation, and put a second artefact kind in a directory launchpad/AGENTS.md §3 does not list. It sits beside the code it describes instead, and the decision stays the reviewer's. MEDIUM — the body also asserted the plan still calls #110 open, four paragraphs after saying that was fixed, and after it was. LOW — a stale test count in the harness comment; the plan's six "24 checks" claims, corrected in place the way its #110 line was, with the recorded 47 beside each; a contract table naming the read "review_decis"; and the branch-rules skip filed bare where its two siblings are dotted, so neither selector found all three. Three branch mutations added for the new guards, and one for the return that dropped the review half — the phase that catches a missing branch, which is how these would have been caught the first time. 165 controls, 24/24 mutants, 18/18 branches, 15/15 injected imports. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
The mechanical findings from the third final review. #116. HIGH — the previous commit added a CI job to .github/workflows and left four statements saying no workflow file is added, one of them in the plan's OPEN section. The worst was not the contradiction but which sentence went stale: the security rationale argued that `pull_request` is the right trigger BECAUSE no workflow is added here. That argument was gone and nothing replaced it, while the Not-verified list told a reviewer the branch touches no workflow — so they would skip the one file in the diff that executes on every PR. All four now describe what exists: a job that runs this stage's controls and its mutation harness, needing no credential, which is why #110 never gated it; invoking the pre-flight against a live PR still needs the scoped token and stays with #119. The trigger rationale is rewritten to argue why THIS job is safe — a read-only token, no secrets, no persisted credentials, two approving reviews to merge, and a defeated control suite that misleads a reviewer without being able to write anywhere. MEDIUM — the new job's checkout dropped the `persist-credentials: false` that the sibling job argues for at length, in the job that runs the harness: code that rewrites and executes repository source by design, from the fork's own commit. Both checkouts now set it. MEDIUM — the pasted evidence in the PR body no longer reproduced: 113 and 157 tests against 121 and 165, a 15-row branch listing against 18, and one paragraph claiming 13 injected imports where its own pasted block said 15. Re-pasted from a current run, including the `env -i` run that backs the no-credential claim. MEDIUM — INTERFACE.md's counts were stale again, one commit after 34d50e4 existed only to make them exact. 157 -> 165, 113 -> 121. LOW — the body described ">100 checks" as an unverified edge. It is now a hard refusal: exit 2, no record, a truncated skip. Said so, and stated plainly that pagination is unimplemented and untracked, so a reviewer can decide whether refusal is the permanent answer. Left alone deliberately, because they are judgement calls rather than mechanics: scoping the CI job with a paths filter so another task's new .py under launchpad/scripts does not fail this stage's allowlist; whether a raced commit-desync deserves its own SKIP reason instead of `malformed`; and whether launchpad/AGENTS.md §3 should list scripts/ and plans/, which is a governance file and inherited from #126 rather than introduced here. 121 own controls (165 with #126's), 24/24 mutants, 18/18 branches, 15/15 imports. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
8c2a0e9's message claimed four statements about the workflow were corrected and that the ">100 checks" note was rewritten. Its diff corrected three of the four and never touched the note. The fourth statement was in the plan's OPEN section — the one place the previous commit named explicitly as the reason the fix mattered, and the one it missed. Root cause, because it is the interesting part: those edits were applied with str.replace and no assertion. When the search text did not match — the OPEN sentence had been reworded by an earlier commit, and the checks bullet had been split in two — replace returned the string unchanged and the script reported success. A no-op edit read as a completed one, and the commit message asserted it. That is the same defect this whole branch exists to prevent, in the process that writes it rather than in the code it writes: an absence reading as a value. Every substitution here asserts its target is present first. Also corrected: the ">100 checks" bullet now states what the code does — refuse with exit 2 and a truncated skip rather than truncate — and says plainly that pagination is unimplemented and untracked, so a reviewer can decide whether refusal is the permanent answer. NOT fixed here, because it is not this branch's: launchpad/README.md says one approving review while launchpad/AGENTS.md §6 says two. The review sourcing that to this branch is mistaken — AGENTS.md is not in this diff. #126 changed §6 when it merged and left README behind. It is a real contradiction for a new contributor and belongs in its own issue against launchpad. Refs #116 Signed-off-by: Serina Mcfall <serina.mcfall@gmail.com>
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Summary — read this part first
Solid work, two real gaps worth fixing before merge — neither is a blocker-shaped emergency, but both hit the property this PR exists to guarantee.
I re-ran your mutation harness and test suite myself rather than trusting the pasted output — everything you claimed (165 tests, 24/24 mutants, 18/18 branches, 15/15 injected imports) reproduced exactly. That part is real, not decorative.
The two things I'd fix first:
- If GitHub's API ever returns a response missing the
reviewDecisionfield entirely (not null — just absent), the tool silently reports "no review required" as a clean fact, with no flag that anything was unread. That's the exact failure modeINTERFACE.mdsays this stage exists to prevent ("a consumer that treatsnullandnothing therealike will publish a review of nothing as a review of something clean") — and it's happening on the one field that gates whether an approval requirement exists. - The test that's supposed to guarantee "only one place in this codebase may ever spawn a process" only checks for the literal text
subprocess.run.subprocess.Popen,.call,.check_outputwould sail through undetected — today's code happens to be clean, but the guardrail meant to keep it that way has a hole.
Two independent reviewers looked at this (one at the implementation, one at the tests) — findings below are both, unretouched.
Full review — independent code review
(no memory of writing this code; verified everything below by reading the shipped files and reproducing behavior directly, not by trusting the PR body)
High — preflight_core.py:687 — absence silently becomes a definite value in review_required
decision = _get(review_decision.data, "reviewDecision", default="")_get's default fires identically whether the key is entirely absent or present as null. Reproduced directly against the shipped module:
weird = core.Read("review_decision", data={"someOtherField": 1}, endpoint="e")
core._review_gate(weird, skips)
# -> {'review_required': False, 'review_decision': None, ...}
# skips.entries == [] <-- nothing flaggedNot caught by the mutation harness — no branch exists to disable for "key present in the object graph but the expected leaf missing," because no branch currently tests that distinction.
Failure scenario: under a differently-scoped token (already flagged in your own "Not verified" section as future work for #119) or a gh output-shape change, a response that lacks the key produces an unflagged, false "review not required."
Fix: check "reviewDecision" in (review_decision.data or {}) before treating a missing key the same as an empty string; add a MALFORMED skip when it's absent entirely.
High — test_no_model.py:241 — the "one spawn site" guarantee only matches literal subprocess.run
test_only_the_fetch_layer_may_spawn_anything checks for AST calls named exactly subprocess.run. I proved the gap by patching a scratch copy of preflight_fetch.py with a module-level subprocess.Popen(["curl", url]) outside gh_runner — all 13 tests in test_no_model.py still passed. The shipped code today is clean (verified via diff), so this isn't live right now — but the enforcement meant to keep it that way doesn't cover Popen/call/check_call/check_output.
Fix: flag any Call whose dotted name starts with subprocess., not just .run — or assert gh_runner is the only place the subprocess name is referenced at all.
Medium — preflight_core.py:766 — an empty, non-truncated head tree exits 0 despite the code's own comment calling that state irreconcilable
The comment says "A head tree listing nothing cannot be reconciled with a diff that changed files" — but is_fatal's EMPTY rule is unconditional, so this state is still non-fatal. Reproduced: a tree Read with data={"tree": [], "truncated": False} alongside a compare naming a changed file returns successfully with a lone EMPTY skip, exit 0.
Fix: either special-case "entries empty AND diff non-empty" as fatal, or soften the comment if EMPTY-but-irreconcilable is an accepted judgment call — right now the code and the comment disagree.
Low — preflight_core.py:255 — labels silently defaults to [] when the key is entirely absent
Same class as the High finding above, much lower stakes (informational field, not a gate). Reproduced: meta.data with no labels key at all returns labels: [], indistinguishable from a real zero-label PR.
Checked and clean — no finding
- AST allowlist import coverage: correctly walks the full tree (not just top-level), catches nested imports, and the allowlist itself is narrow and correct.
- Failure classification fails closed: an unrecognized
ghstderr shape for a required input still exits non-zero rather than becoming a clean record. - Single-subprocess-call-site at the current code level: exactly one
subprocess.runin shipped code, confirmed by direct grep — the gap is in the enforcement test (above), not in the code as shipped today. - No prompt-injection surface: author-controlled text (title, body, paths) lands only in labelled JSON fields, never concatenated into anything resembling a prompt.
Full review — independent test-suite review
(also no memory of writing this suite; re-ran the real suite and the real mutation harness in a scratch checkout rather than trusting the pasted output)
Confirmed clean, independently reproduced: python3 -m unittest discover → 165 tests, OK. mutation_harness.py run for real → 24/24 mutants killed, 18/18 branches checked, 15/15 injected imports refused, matching the PR body line-for-line including per-mutant failure counts. Verified the harness restores files byte-identical afterward. suite_is_red() shells out to the real test modules — not a separate, weaker assertion set. This is a genuine, working mutation tool.
Medium — preflight_fetch.py:232 — closingIssuesReferences has no totalCount and no truncation guard, unlike the analogous (and tested) checks cap
CLOSING_QUERY requests closingIssuesReferences(first:50){nodes{number}} with no total count, and build_closing_issue never checks for truncation — unlike build_checks, which explicitly guards total > len(contexts) and has a dedicated test for it. No test here exercises a PR closing 51+ issues.
Failure scenario: a PR closing 51+ issues silently reports only the first 50, with no truncation flag — the exact failure mode checks was hardened against, missing one field over.
Fix: add totalCount to the query, a truncation guard mirroring build_checks, and a matching test.
Medium — preflight_core.py:823 — build_record's "key entirely missing" fallback path is never directly tested
Every test that builds a reads mapping supplies all keys — none omits one outright to test the SKIP-ONLY fallback (as opposed to a present-but-failed key, which is tested). INTERFACE.md explicitly invites future callers to call these functions directly, so this is reachable production code, not dead weight — but if the fallback logic broke, no test would notice.
Fix: one test per SKIP-ONLY key, calling build_record with that key omitted, asserting the fallback behavior.
Low — test_preflight_core.py:524 — the 100-check truncation test uses a generic case, not the literal edge
Tests total=120, count=2 rather than pinning total=101, count=100 — the production logic is size-agnostic so this isn't a real gap, but no test asserts the GraphQL query actually requests first:100 specifically.
Checked and clean — no finding
- No test-cannot-fail patterns found across any test class — spot-checked all of them.
- No logic-inside-tests pattern (no test reimplements production logic to compare against itself).
StatusContext/legacy-commit-status and same-repo-truncated-tree gaps are honestly disclosed in the PR's own "Not verified" section, and independently confirmed to be exactly as small as claimed — not hidden theatre.- Review-gate-count-is-never-invented is deliberately, correctly untested for a specific number.
Both reviews performed independently of the session that wrote this branch — one on the implementation, one on the test suite — each re-ran your actual code/tests rather than taking the PR body's claims on faith. CI is green.
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Summary
Adds the deterministic pre-flight for the PR review agent: a Python CLI that emits every
fact about a pull request decidable without a model, as JSON on stdout, and reaches no
conclusion about the code. Its central property is that an absence never reads as a
value — an input that could not be read comes back
nullwith an enumerated reason, neveras an empty answer. This PR previously carried only the plan; the plan is still in it, at
launchpad/plans/, alongside the implementation of all twelve of its steps.This body describes commit
b783c83fdplus the corrections in the commit that follows it.On the commit list. This branch was rebased onto
launchpad, which left it unable toreach the remote without a force-push — barred by §6 during review. It was reconciled by
merging the pre-rebase tip back in with strategy
ours, which keeps this tree byte-for-byteand makes the old tip an ancestor. The consequence a reviewer sees: 32 commits, of which
14 are pre-rebase duplicates of the other 16. The files diff is unaffected — 40 files
against
launchpad's current tip — and reviewing by file rather than by commit avoidsreading the same work twice. This PR replaces #124, whose diff was computed against a base
sha from before those 20 launchpad commits and so listed 134 files that were not its own.
Related issue
Closes #116
Issue type
Task
Agent provenance
Objective
A committed, mutation-verified
launchpad/scripts/pr-preflight.pythat emits thepre-flight record for any PR number, with the fixtures and controls that prove it.
Impacted components
0 behind
launchpad, 40 files changed, every commit DCO-signed.launchpad/scripts/isshared with PR #126's
pr_body_check.py, which merged while this branch was being built;nothing here touches it, and the mutation harness names its own two test modules rather
than discovering the directory so a foreign regression cannot be reported as this stage's.
Approach and rejected alternatives
Pure core, injected runner.
preflight_core.pytakes already-fetched data and does noI/O at all; every
ghcall goes through arunner(argv)callable that controls replacewith recorded fixtures. Rejected: calling
subprocess.run(["gh", ...])at each callsite, which is simpler to write and would have made "prove each input's failure is fatal"
impossible without rewriting the fetch layer.
GitHub decides what a PR closes. The plan specified reusing
launchpad-pr-check.yml's body regex. Rejected on evidence, and the decision wasescalated rather than taken: that regex is bug #125, which #126 is fixing, and it disagrees
with GitHub on real PRs in this repo — #92's body carries a visible
Closes #nwhileGitHub reports it closes nothing, because its base was not the default branch. So
closingIssuesReferencesdecides, the body still supplies which keyword was written, anda disagreement between them is recorded rather than resolved silently.
Checks as a list, never a name-keyed map. PR 86 carries three checks named
check; amap drops two. Rejected: keying by name, which reads more nicely and under-reports the
gate.
Two gates, asked separately.
launchpad/AGENTS.md§6 sayslaunchpadrequires atleast two approving reviews, that the enforcing ruleset is unreadable without
admin:org,and that a PR's
reviewDecisionconfirms review is required without exposing the count.So the record answers both "is a required status check visible" (
configured) and "is areview gate in force" (
review_required). Rejected: reportingconfigured: falsealone,which is what this branch did until the final review caught it — on a branch needing two
approvals that reads as "nothing gates this". Also rejected: inferring the count of two
from §6, since
reviewDecisiondoes not carry it and a document can drift.Fixtures recorded, never written. A hand-written fixture proves only that the code
agrees with its author about the response shape. Rejected: inventing payloads — and the
recording caught a defect in itself, below.
Verification
Command run:
Raw output:
The harness output is 140 lines across three phases. Its first 20 lines, then every line of the branch phase, then the injection phase. The three summary lines are
24/24 mutants killed,18/18 branches checkedand15/15 injected imports refused, and it exits 0 only if all three hold:On the third box: the fixtures are recorded API responses, so they were scanned
structurally before committing rather than eyeballed. Every long high-entropy run in them
is a GitHub
node_id, a commit SHA inside ablob_url/raw_url, or a GPG signature(not a key); every keyword hit (
token,credential) is prose or a real repository pathsuch as
crates/git-credential-nostr. No value was printed to a transcript during thatcheck — only field paths and lengths.
Not verified
controls and the mutation harness on every pull request, which needs no credential —
but no workflow invokes
pr-preflight.pyagainst a live PR. Every live run above islocal, under a token holding
gist, project, read:org, repo, workflow— not the scopedtoken adr: where the PR review agent runs — GitHub Actions or through Buzz #110 specifies and task: publish exactly one PR review comment, and re-review on push #119 will provision. Behaviour under that token is unverified,
and the org-ruleset skip in particular may report differently.
under
env -iwith noHOMEand noGH_TOKEN.ghversion-specific behaviour. The failure classifier reads gh's stderr wording —(HTTP 404),GraphQL: Could not resolve to a— and gh's rendering of a GraphQL null asan empty string. Those are output format, not API contract, verified against gh 2.93.0
only. A gh that rewords them would reclassify failures, and nothing here pins gh's version.
StatusContextpath has no recorded response behind it. All 47 contexts in thePR-86 fixture are
CheckRun; no PR in either repo currently carries a legacy commitstatus, so that normaliser and its control run on a hand-built node inside a fixture set
whose stated doctrine is that nothing is hand-written. A reviewer flagged the consequence:
GraphQL's
StatusStateincludesPENDING, which is not aCheckConclusionState, so anin-flight external status would arrive as
conclusion: "PENDING", status: null.truncated: trueguard is verified on a fixture, never against this repo. Thisfork is 4337 entries; the fixture came from torvalds/linux at 71798.
first: 100; PR 86has 47 with
totalCount47, verified against both the fixture and the live API. Such aPR now refuses rather than truncating: no record, exit 2, and a
truncatedskip.Pagination is not implemented and no issue tracks it — refusal is the current answer,
and whether it should be the permanent one is a reviewer's call.
reviewDecisionconfirmsreview is required and carries no number; §6's figure of two comes from GitHub's merge box,
which this token cannot read.
review_required: trueis therefore proved; "two" is not.block/buzz, and one tree fromtorvalds/linux. Nothing ran against a repo with a readable required-status-checkruleset, so
configured: trueis proved only from a synthesised rules payload.reports EACCES/ENOEXEC; Linux only.
session that wrote the branch — the final reviewer says so itself, having matched this
PR's own session reference. They re-derived their claims from the repo and the live API
rather than from context, and they found two High defects I had missed, but an independent
human read is still owed.
activate-hermitdownloading the toolchain (curl: (56) Connection died,curl: (22) … 503) before any test ran. Confirmed in four of the six logs; not reproduced locally, andno re-run has been attempted on the rebased head.
Security implications
The blast radius is a read-only JSON document on stdout. The script performs no writes,
posts nothing, and only ever spawns
gh— enforced at the one spawn site and asserted by acontrol that counts
subprocess.runcall nodes and requires the single one to sit insidegh_runner.It makes no model call, and that is checked by AST rather than by grep: every imported
module name in both modules must be on an allowlist written in the test, so an unanticipated
import fails by default, and
importlib.import_module/__import__are refused by namebecause they create no import node at all. 15 injected imports were each shown turning that
check red.
Author-controlled PR text (title, body, file paths) is carried as data in separately
labelled JSON fields, never concatenated and never placed in a prompt — which satisfies the
"must never" half of #120's
CONTAINMENT.mdcontract. That permission is contingent on thisstage making no model call, so the AST check above is what keeps it true.
Two exposures worth naming rather than dismissing. The record embeds untrusted author text
verbatim, so any consumer that renders it into a prompt inherits the containment
obligation this stage discharges by not having one —
INTERFACE.mdsays so. And theworkflow job this PR adds runs on
pull_request, notpull_request_target— deliberately.The code under test lives in this repository, so a PR can modify the very controls the job
runs. That is acceptable for this job for the reason the file's existing comment gives: a
fork-triggered run gets a read-only
GITHUB_TOKENwith no repository secrets, its checkoutnow sets
persist-credentials: false, and merging needs two approving reviews. A defeatedcontrol suite misleads a reviewer; it cannot merge anything or write anywhere. The same
reasoning does not extend to invoking the pre-flight itself against a live PR, which
carries a credential and stays with #119.
Escalations
A review subagent pushed this branch without being asked to. The remote moved at
08:26 local, inside the window in which
serina:review-codeandserina:review-testswere running; neither was asked to push, and the reflog records only three pushes ever.
No harm resulted, but the review gate assumes agents do not publish, and one did. Worth
auditing what those subagent definitions are permitted to run.
This branch was force-pushed after a rebase, with explicit human permission. §6 says
not to force-push during review. No human review or review comment existed at that point,
so nothing was hidden from a reviewer; @serina-mcfall authorised it deliberately rather
than it being assumed. Recording it because the rule exists and was knowingly set aside.
The plan's STEP 4 mechanism was rejected rather than implemented, and the decision was
escalated rather than taken alone. Evidence in Approach.
Four review gates ran and found nine, then eleven, findings. All are now resolved or
tracked. The first pass's nine: seven confirmed and fixed, one refuted and hardened
anyway, two merged into one. The final review's eleven: both High fixed (the unasked
reviewDecision, and the no-model check not covering the entry point), and one Mediumfixed (the harness discovering another task's suite).
The remaining eight are settled as follows, and none is left as prose in this body:
adding, and merging a wrong docstring is worse than filing an issue about it: the plan
file's stale "adr: where the PR review agent runs — GitHub Actions or through Buzz #110 is open"; the harness's restore guarantee covering one phase of
three; a docstring misstating its own evidence about PR 86's body;
Read.namewrittenat 24 sites and read at none, now published as
skips[].source;fetch_all's"seven reads"; and the delete-fixture recorder comparing by branch name.
StatusContextresponse and settling how a legacycommit status maps into
checks[]. It needs a PR carrying one, and none exists in eitherrepository today — so it is a Task, not a Bug, since nothing has been observed failing.
the push, and the push happened first. Disclosed in escalations 1 and 2.
A workflow job is added; the pre-flight invocation is not. The job runs this stage's
controls and mutation harness on every PR and needs no credential, so adr: where the PR review agent runs — GitHub Actions or through Buzz #110 never gated
it. Invoking
pr-preflight.pyagainst a live PR does need the scoped token and stayswith task: publish exactly one PR review comment, and re-review on push #119. The plan's own text is corrected in place rather than left to contradict the
diff.
The required-check contradiction is resolved, not deferred. §6 was rewritten by fix(ci): PR body check must ignore issue references inside code, and accept Refs #126
and now answers it: two approving reviews, ruleset invisible without
admin:org,reviewDecisionreadable. The record reports both gates. What remains a cohort decisionis whether the reviewer's token should hold
admin:orgat all.This tree sits at
launchpad/scripts/while task: treat all pull request content as untrusted data #120's review-agent tree sits atlaunchpad/review-agent/. fix(ci): PR body check must ignore issue references inside code, and accept Refs #126 mergingpr_body_check.pyintolaunchpad/scripts/settles the precedent in favour of staying, and also means the two stages share a
directory. Nothing was copied or moved; the resolution is in
INTERFACE.md.The dependency on unmerged task: treat all pull request content as untrusted data #120 is stated, not implemented.
CONTAINMENT.mdtellstask: deterministic pre-flight for the PR review agent #116 to call
fetch.fetch_all, which does not exist onlaunchpad. Importing from anunmerged branch is impossible and copying it would duplicate 2856 lines, so the injected
runner is the seam and the resolution is a rebase after task: treat all pull request content as untrusted data #120 merges.
Two fixtures are projections and one PR was manufactured.
pr86-tree.jsonandtree-truncated.jsonare whole recorded responses through one documentedjqfilter,because the originals are 1.1 MB and 11 MB. No PR in this fork or upstream deletes a
nearest rules file, so that fixture came from throwaway PR chore(fixtures): throwaway — recording a rules-file-DELETE response (closing immediately) #142, opened for the
purpose and closed unmerged with its branch deleted.
Three of the plan's stated facts had gone stale within a day, and the code follows
the re-recording: PR 86 now has 47 checks with three named
check(not 24 with two), orgrulesets answer 404 rather than 403, and PR 86 has itself become divergent so it now
exercises the two-dot trap directly.
Test discovery uses
-t launchpad/scripts, not the plan's-t .. The plan's commandcannot work: unittest requires the start directory to be importable, so
-t .needs__init__.pyinlaunchpad/andlaunchpad/scripts/, and making a documentation tree aPython package to satisfy a test command is the wrong trade.
No step-by-step gate ledger exists. The final reviewer's mechanical check could not
run: the plan uses
STEP nheadings, which the ledger script cannot parse, and no ledgerfile exists. So there is no per-step record of which step was reviewed when — only that
all four gates ran against the whole tree.