Step 5 — Watch PR State to a Terminal Verdict

Block until the PR reaches a merge-gate-relevant terminal state. The watcher polls poll-pr-reviews.sh at a script-owned interval up to a script-owned budget and watches exactly the fields the Step 7 merge gate reads — each gating bot's latest review state (resolved by bot login), CI status, and merge state. Do not hand-roll a poll loop, and do not wrap the watch in an invented wall-clock timeout (see rules/ci-safety.md "Always Watch CI"). Read the release contract's Pre-Merge Watch Mechanics first; it binds this step:

skills/release/references/release-contract.md

Then run the watcher:

KS=.tessl/plugins/jbaruch/coding-policy/skills/release/; [ -d "$KS" ] || KS="$HOME/$KS"; [ -d "$KS" ] || case "$(git config --get remote.origin.url)" in git@github.com:jbaruch/coding-policy|git@github.com:jbaruch/coding-policy.git|https://github.com/jbaruch/coding-policy|https://github.com/jbaruch/coding-policy.git|ssh://git@github.com/jbaruch/coding-policy|ssh://git@github.com/jbaruch/coding-policy.git) KS=skills/release/ ;; *) echo "coding-policy skill not found: run tessl install jbaruch/coding-policy" >&2; exit 1 ;; esac
bash "$KS/watch-pr-reviews.sh" <owner> <repo> <pr-number>

It returns the full poll-pr-reviews.sh snapshot plus a watch object — {"result": ..., "attempts": N, "elapsed_seconds": N}. The result meanings and readiness predicate belong to skills/release/watch-pr-reviews.sh — its top-of-file result matrix. The actions below consume those results without duplicating their conditions. Branch on .watch.result:

• ready (exit 0) — the script reports merge readiness. Proceed to Step 6 to read every review body and inline comment before acting.
• changes_requested (exit 0) — go to Step 6, address blocking findings from either reviewer, push and re-run the watcher.
• ci_failure (exit 0) — fix the failed checks through Step 6, push and re-run the watcher.
• dirty (exit 0) — rebase onto current main, resolve conflicts, force-push the owned feature branch and re-run the watcher.
• pending_at_budget (exit 1) — a signal never arrived within the budget (a reviewer that never posted, CI stuck pending). Inspect which field is still none/pending in the returned snapshot. If either reviewer never posted on coding-policy's own PRs, inspect review-codex.yml or review-claude.yml and its subscription credential (CODEX_AUTH_JSON or CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN). On a consumer repo, confirm review-trigger.yml dispatched and the fleet App ran in coding-policy; its scheduled poll is the backstop. Re-run the watcher to keep waiting once the cause is understood.