Run GitHub Project

The Project is the live control plane. Apply these invariants throughout:

1. Live authority: claims, selection, and finish decisions require complete, fresh GitHub and Project state; cache and partial reads are hints only.
2. Controller ownership: only the controller claims, assigns, mutates shared Project state, merges, closes issues, and reconciles. A ticket agent owns its worktree, branch, and non-merge PR mutations only.
3. Unknown outcomes: reconcile a failed or timed-out remote mutation before retrying or reporting success.
4. Preservation: retain blocked, dependency-gated, and human-owned work in its authoritative frontier or partial-drain report; never change state merely to make the queue appear empty.

Preserve Planning authority through contract-preserving replans, return true human work to Backlog, and in drain pair occupied slots with warm worktrees and persistent ticket agents. Park only qualifying terminal required-CI claims outside capacity before refreshing the control plane.

Select the mode

• review: inspect or explain only; no operation.
• setup: configure, validate, or repair the binding only; no Project work.
• next: default execution; process at most one selected issue.
• drain: only on explicit drain/run-all/repeat/until-empty request.

A named Wayfinder child remains next; it grants neither drain authority nor a claim bypass. Before any mode-specific action, read the matching mandatory lane:

For execution, read workflow providers before preconditions; it is authoritative on required, conditional, optional providers, sources, installation commands, and lane-specific fallback. Never install a provider implicitly. Read all providers and specialist contracts required by the execution-controller lane before their relevant action. For drain, read drain scheduler completely before drain queue work. For next or drain, read review contracts completely before acceptance work.

Cross-mode boundaries

review may inspect only permitted repository, supplied, and read-only remote state. It never configures, ranks, claims, transitions, triages, plans, delegates, mutates, pushes, merges, or closes. Finish review-complete with evidence, safe next action, and uncertainty, or review-blocked.

setup reads the configuration required to produce and validate a binding but requires neither execution dependencies or authority nor clean execution state. It never ranks/claims, changes Project/issue/PR state, creates worktrees, plans, implements, pushes, or merges. It finishes only configuration-valid, configuration-ready-to-commit, or configuration-blocked.

next and drain require the controller and lifecycle lanes. Standing authority expires on stop, timeout, crash, or interruption. Do not support publish-only mode or impose a skill-defined ticket cap in drain.

Final report

The selected lane defines terminal state and report evidence. setup reports only identity, configuration files/read-or-changed, live validation, unresolved values, committed-base state, and one configuration result. Execution reports mode, capacity, configuration digest, live queries, authority, scheduler, providers, routing ledger, frontiers, parked/triage/reconciliation outcomes, and per-ticket selection, lease/plan, branch/commit/PR, verification/review, reconciled mutation/merge, and final preserved or cleaned state.