re0-merge

• SKILL.mdcore · 4,716 bytes

Land a contribution fairly: credit preserved, the maintainer's changes legible, accepted on the record.

## Goal

A contribution is a gift with a permanent carrying cost, and a review either honors both or fails one. `re0-merge` walks whoever reviews — any collaborator or maintainer, not just the author — through accepting a pull request the way this suite does: judged against the thesis, landed with the author's authorship intact, the maintainer's own edits kept as separate commits, and closed with an approval and a credit rather than a silent rejection.

## Workflow

1. **Gate before landing.** An additive contribution is declined by default; the burden is on the addition to show the suite is worse without it, not on you to justify a no. Judge each PR alone, never as a batch: a bug-fix subtracts a defect and is the easy yes; new tooling earns a place only if it mechanizes a rule already enforced by hand; a new skill lands only if it closes a real gap no existing one covers. A well-reasoned decline is a shipped outcome, not a failure.
2. **Cold-read it first.** Read the contribution end to end with fresh eyes (a `shower` pass when installed) before deciding; a name or claim that reads clean to its author may not to a stranger.
3. **Verify, do not re-fix.** Where the author already pushed a fix, prove it with a throwaway regression case rather than rewriting it; the credit for the fix is theirs.
4. **Approve as you accept, then land on a `land/pr-<n>` branch** (a range only for a genuine multi-PR batch). Submit the approving review the moment you decide to accept, before the land — it is a verdict on the contributor's code, not a receipt for a release, and giving it now (not bundled with the later close) is what keeps a closed-not-merged PR reading as accepted. Then accept each contributor commit with its authorship preserved (you become the committer; clean the message with `re0-git`), add every maintainer change as its own separate commit so the credit split stays legible, and fast-forward into `main`.
5. **Complete a new skill, don't merge it raw.** Get the name right (a plain real word or tight compression, no opaque coinage), the invocation right (model- vs user-invoked), and the home right; then register it on every roster surface (`plugin.json`, the README Index in root and every localized copy, `re0-upgrade`'s Current catalog, `scripts/catalog.cjs`) so no drift-guard trips.
6. **After the release the contribution shipped in confirms, close the PR with the comment.** Close it in the same motion as a comment that credits and explains — never a silent close, and never before the release lands. The approval from step 4 already records it as accepted; this step only closes and explains.