Releases

You are promoting development into main. Enforcement (D-004): the release-gate required check — detailed below.

Promoting development into main is a release, and it is a standardized two-PR train run by the /promote ritual (.claude/commands/promote.md); the step-by-step canonical path is the release checklist. The shape:

1. Bump decision — the operator's call. The agent derives the release contents from main..development (first-parent merges), proposes a bump class per change with reasoning, and stops for the operator to pick patch / minor / major — a hard STOP; an unanswered question blocks, it never defaults.
2. Caboose PR into development: the version file bumped and the release-log entry prepended (both named by the seam .claude/release.txt), the entry derived from the contents list — bundling every promoted change, never written from memory.
3. Promotion PR development → main from .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/promotion.md, restating Closes #N for every issue the train completed. This restatement is default-branch-agnostic by construction: closing keywords only fire on PRs into the repo's default branch, so on a main-default repo the restated lines are what actually closes the issues (integration merges never did), while on a dev-default repo they are a harmless no-op that doubles as the release's issue manifest. The issue-link-guard vets the restated set either way (Opening a PR has the closing-keyword grammar). If the guard passes on a waiver, the promotion PR body also names each waived finding with its true reason. Advisory, stated as such (D-004): nothing checks a promotion PR body, and the guard announces every Skip-Issue-Link-Guard trailer in range without matching any to a finding — a promotion range can hold stale trailers — so a human states the finding-to-reason match; review verifies it.
4. Operator-only finish: merge (never self-merge, never the agent) and the annotated tag on the main merge commit.

Enforcement (D-004): the release-gate job (.github/workflows/branch-flow-guard.yml, required on main) fails a promotion whose seam-named version file is not bumped by exactly one semver step, or whose release log lacks an entry for the new version (logic: scripts/release_gate_decision.sh; suite: scripts/test_release_gate.sh). A project that does not version its promotions declares mode: off <reason> in .claude/release.txt — the bootstrap gate forces every seeded project to resolve that seam either way. Advisory, stated as such: whether the operator was actually asked (the ritual STOP + the promotion template's confirmation checkbox are the enforcers) and whether the restated Closes set is complete (the ritual generates it; review verifies it).