2026-08-11 — Pull-request lifecycle automation for autonomous rounds settled

2026-08-11 — Pull-request lifecycle automation for autonomous rounds settled five points, recorded against the existing records rather than a new intent (one-canonical-primitive: iss-172, iss-178 and itd-107 already hold this ground; capture promote would have minted a sixth). (1) AUTO-MERGE ELIGIBILITY splits on additive-versus-editing, not documentation-versus-code: a new record file plus an append to this log, insertions only, record gate green, single commit. The evidence is this repo's own correction history — the post-merge correction commits in the recent window each fix a FALSE CLAIM about the system ("describe the real fix", "state what is true", the packaging and exclusion claims), which no deterministic gate catches, and all of them sit in changes that REWRITE existing prose; the purely additive captures needed none. (2) The eligible set is an ALLOWLIST of inert paths, never a denylist of source extensions: the plugin command pages, the rules file, the lint configuration and the agent-instruction router are markdown or JSON that change behaviour, so a "no source touched" test fails open on all of them. (3) Intent DRAFTS count as additive — the lifecycle already gates at promotion (adoption is a maintainer decision; implementing an unready intent is a STOP), so a second gate at merge is redundant. (4) The strict status-check policy is NOT relaxed to smooth the stalled-behind-base condition: it is the only thing that gates a concurrently-minted duplicate record id, because the mint lock is a filesystem lock that does not span checkouts and each branch passes in isolation; the stall is cleared by updating the branch instead. (5) Delivery is rung 1 first — protocol in the rendered routine, host credentials — per script-first-mvp, with the binary acquiring no platform CLI dependency. Deferred to the itd-107 grill: the rung-2 credential question, a declared merge style, peer-session concurrency policy, and attribution-footer defence depth.