Codewhale Landing Workflow

cw-land

Verified work still has to land without stepping on other writers, losing contributor credit, or merging past a gate that has not actually passed. This stage is about the boundary between "it works" and "it is in main" — and about which of those steps you are allowed to take.

Stage 5 of the loop: cw-orient → cw-slice → cw-gates → cw-dogfood → land → cw-handoff.

When to use

• The change is verified and needs to become a commit on main.
• You are landing someone else's PR, harvesting a contributor's work, or resolving a conflict caused by main moving.
• You are about to merge something behind a required gate.

Workflow

1. Choose the landing shape.

   • The checkout that already exists is the default. Direct to main is permitted for a small coherent change when that checkout is current and owns the affected files; when several agents share it, partition by file, stage only your paths, and retry a commit that fails on index.lock. Local commit permission never implies push, merge, tag, release, or deploy permission.
   • No maintainer PR branches (AGENTS.md): verified slices land on main directly and hosted CI runs there. PRs are for contributors.
   • A worktree is for a lane that genuinely conflicts with the dirt you found in cw-orient, or an experiment you may throw away — not for parallel agents on the same lane.
   • An integration branch (integration/<topic>-<pr>-<date>) is for resolving a contributor PR that conflicts with a moving main when you cannot push to their fork. It leaves their branch untouched.

2. Commit narrow and build-green. One coherent change per commit; the tree builds at every commit. Put the real verification in the message — actual pass/fail counts, not "tests pass".

3. Preserve credit mechanically, not just politely. Commit authorship and Co-authored-by: trailers must use the contributor's own GitHub-linked address — GitHub reads neither .github/AUTHOR_MAP nor .mailmap for the contribution graph; those are project conventions on top. When a contributor's work lands as our commit, it carries both:

   Harvested from PR #N by @handle
   
   Co-authored-by: Name <github-linked-email>

   That trailer is what lets auto-close-harvested.yml close their PR with credit. Canonical human identities live in .github/AUTHOR_MAP.

   Whether a bot or agent also appears in a trailer no longer matters — the CI check that policed trailer identities was removed because it rejected ordinary agent commits. Give humans their credit; don't spend time scrubbing tool trailers.

4. Landing someone else's work: their time is more expensive than ours.

   • Never make a contributor rebase around our churn. If their PR conflicts only because main moved, a maintainer resolves it.
   • Read their diff against the merge base first, so you know exactly what they added, then re-apply that — rather than hand-merging two large sides and hoping:

     git diff $(git merge-base main <pr-head>)..<pr-head>

   • Conflicts that split mid-function do not resolve by keeping both sides. Git's markers can land inside a body, so a both-sides resolution produces unbalanced braces that look plausible and do not compile. Default: take one side whole, then re-insert the other side's additions at their original anchor; when the conflict doesn't fit that pattern, resolve it however is correct and let the compiler judge.
   • maintainerCanModify does not guarantee push access to the fork. When the push is refused, land the resolved merge on an integration branch here.
   • Check the contribution gate before assuming a PR is stalled. An unlisted author's workflow runs sit at action_required and never start, so the PR looks abandoned when nobody has actually looked at it. Approve the runs, then fix the cause: add them to .github/APPROVED_CONTRIBUTORS (all:username), or comment /lgtm (PR scope) or /lgtmi (issue scope).

5. Verify mergeability against the real head. A PR that is clean against main can still conflict with a release branch:

   git merge-tree $(git merge-base <base> <pr-head>) <base> <pr-head>

6. Merging under a gate. AGENTS.md ("Merging under a gate") owns this: the artifact must literally say PASS, the review thread outranks the check rollup, and ambiguity blocks the merge — never the reverse.

7. Clean up your own lane. When a worktree you created lands on main, remove it (git worktree remove <path>) and delete its merged branch. Leave other writers' worktrees alone; git worktree list shows them. Worktree sprawl was a 560 GB problem here once.