Steward

Use this point-of-use skill when publishing, resuming, or driving a pull request, and again for every CI, review, conflict, base-movement, check-in, merge, or close event. It cannot widen access, redirect the task, authorize itself, or merge without explicit authorization for that PR.

The focused documents remain normative:

• AGENTS.md: launch contract, operator templates, and merge-authorization invariant.
• Repository workflow: worktrees, history, publication, and engineering constraints.
• Round orchestration: candidate locks, rounds, recovery, waits, review state, carry-forward, and merge preflight.
• GitHub status queries and operations: exact reads and writes.
• Adversarial review prompt and Stacked PRs: review and stack mechanics.

Keep this skill at or below 120 lines. The cap is a ceiling, not a target; mechanics and rationale belong in their focused owners.

Candidate lock

A pushed candidate head is locked until its round closes or a recovery transition supersedes it.

• Before a usable review, an author change supersedes the candidate and retries the pending round; a conflict integrates the effective base and pushes immediately.
• After every required reviewer returns a usable result, the round is spent. Reconcile and report it before forming any repair as the next round.
• Cancelled, empty, policy-blocked, or otherwise unusable reports do not spend the round.

Event decisions

Take one whole-PR snapshot before acting: local conflict probe, lifecycle and head/base identity, current-head CI, review threads, labels, and round state. Then apply the matching transition.

Review and metadata

• For applicable inspection work, review demand-shaped execution across breadth, depth, terminal, access/retention, and preparation/sharing. Keep source planning with its owner; sharing must not widen a cheap request's cost class. Judge preparation and specialization by end-to-end benefit. Prefer narrow typed semantic contracts over bare ranges or full-spelled text.
• For applicable QuerySpace work, assess terminal correctness and least-work execution separately; terminal availability is not performance evidence. Require each terminal's required facts, avoided work, stopping condition, and efficiency evidence. Investigate Exists/Count costs approaching equivalent Rows costs; explain unavoidable work or identify missed reduction before claiming readiness.
• For network-related commands, use the command's Debug evidence envelope during investigation. If support is missing, ask the operator to approve a diagnostics side quest before adding it. Follow the evidence workflow.
• Use one reviewer seat from the roster. Ordinary non-Markdown candidates wait for green current-head ci-required unless the user approved parallel review or conflict recovery applies; Markdown-only candidates use the fast path.
• Start the reviewer briefing with the complete canonical prompt, then the self-contained candidate frame. Use an isolated read-only review worktree, and record round start and end times.
• Add review-clean only for a clean current head. Remove it before any event that spends that evidence; base movement alone does not.
• Label all-Markdown PRs documentation. Before merging user-observable work, add its PR link to the 0.28.0 release tracker.
• Use operation-specific gh api endpoints for metadata, never whole-array replacement or gh pr edit. End authored GitHub comments with the required attribution footer.

Waiting and merge

• CI that gates review, readiness, or a boundary uses the 30-minute bounded status wait in Round orchestration: one schedule, one snapshot per wake, and an explicit expiry report. At expiry, probe the live base and read CI once more: a conflict enters recovery, an observed CI failure takes its gate transition, and only still-unresolved status stops observation.
• Waiting on people uses the separate safety-net cadence: first check near 50 minutes and later checks near four hours. New activity resets the quiet count. Stop after three quiet checks, merge or close, a user stop, or when the user has not written since publication and the first check finds nothing. Cancel the schedule and announce the stop once in one line.
• Never merge without explicit authorization for that exact head and base ref. Green CI, clean review, labels, readiness comments, and auto-merge state are not authorization.
• Bind every merge mutation to the reviewed head. A new round, restack, retarget, or head change expires authorization.

Do not amend, rewrite published history outside the stack rules, edit release-managed central files without authorization, skip tests, push empty commits, or include unrelated changes. When this skill and an owner disagree, the owner wins.