docs(agents): never commit review artifacts to a contributor's fork - #286
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The artifact rule said "PR review -> on the PR branch" without qualifying who owns it, so reviewing a community PR meant pushing to the contributor's branch. That happened on two fork PRs this week. maintainerCanModify makes the push possible; it is not permission. It also backfires mechanically: this repo dismisses stale reviews on push, so the review-doc commit dismisses the approval it documents and staleness-flags the approval label against the new head. Fork PRs now have no committed artifact — the formal review body is the artifact. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GvZKP1JeXgHFCovTaAPT5B
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Problem
AGENTS.mdtold the review agent to commit PR review artifacts "on the PR branch," without qualifying who owns that branch. On a community PR from a fork, following that instruction literally means pushing to the contributor's branch — and that is what happened this week on #274 (Gunther-Schulz:pr/header-propagation) and #277 (Gunther-Schulz:pr/graceful-stop). Both pushes have been reverted; the branches are back to the contributors' own commits, and an apology is posted on #274.The agent was following our documented rule. The rule is the defect.
Why it matters beyond etiquette
maintainerCanModify: truemakes the push mechanically possible on most community PRs. It is not permission — a contributor's branch is theirs, and a force-visible history rewrite can land on top of local work they have in flight.It also backfires mechanically. This repo dismisses stale reviews on push, so the review-doc commit dismisses the very approval it documents, and any
approved-by-*label instantly goes stale against the new head. Both #274 and #277 ended up with aDISMISSEDapproval and a stale approval label as a direct result.Change
Fork PRs get no committed artifact — the formal
gh pr reviewbody is the artifact. Org-owned PR branches are unchanged. Adds an explicit pre-write check (gh pr view <N> --json headRepositoryOwner).Non-Functional Requirements
Testing
Documentation only — no test surface. Verified the two affected fork branches are restored to their contributors' commits (
4f2eb482on #274,c814fd2fon #277).Note on the pre-push hook
The pre-push guard flagged path leaks and was overridden with
GIT_PUSH_GUARD_ALLOW=1. Every match is in pre-existingmainhistory (olderdocs/code-reviews/artifacts carrying absolute paths), not in this commit.git log origin/main..HEADis a single commit and it contains no paths, hostnames, or addresses. This is the documented rebase-range case.— Proxy Builder