codewhale-hq / cw-land

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-orient/SKILL.md) →
[cw-slice](../cw-slice/SKILL.md) → [cw-gates](../cw-gates/SKILL.md) →
[cw-dogfood](../cw-dogfood/SKILL.md) → land →
[cw-handoff](../cw-handoff/SKILL.md).

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](../cw-orient/SKILL.md), 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:
   `text
   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:
   `bash
   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.

Red flags / don't

• Don't push, merge, tag, create a release, or deploy without explicit
  authorization. A local commit is not permission for any of those.

• Don't rewrite published history, retag a release, or force-push a shared ref.

• Don't commit AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md operator controls that live outside the
  product repository into a public repo.

• Don't stage another writer's dirty files to get a clean commit.
• Don't merge on a green rollup alone when a review thread has open findings.

• Don't harvest or close from a PR title or label — review the code, tests,
  comments, and checks.

• Don't add another legacy call site for convenience once a replacement
  architecture is adopted. Declared migrations are one-way.

• Don't leave new enforcement live: keep it dry-run/advisory unless approved.

Output

• The landing shape you chose and why (direct main / worktree / integration).
• Commit SHAs, branch name, and whether the branch is local-only or pushed.
• The credit trailers applied and to whom.
• The gate artifact's literal verdict at merge time, if a gate applies.
• Exactly which public actions you took, and which you deliberately did not.