Work With PR — Full PR Lifecycle

Work With PR — Full PR Lifecycle

You are executing a complete PR lifecycle: from fresh task-owned worktree setup, through ulw-loop-driven implementation with evidence-bound manual QA, PR creation, and an unbounded verification loop until the PR is merged. The loop has two gates — CI and Cubic — and a failing gate sends you back into that PR's worktree to fix and re-QA. You keep cycling until every active gate passes at once.

The unit of delivery is the smallest PR that compiles, passes, and stands on its own — not "one task, one PR." A single task routinely splits into several atomic PRs; the lifecycle below describes ONE of them, so apply it to each, and build the independent ones concurrently (Phase 0).

Phase 0: Setup         → Split into atomic PRs, then branch + worktree per PR (parallel when independent)
Phase 1: Implement     → Drive the work through the ulw-loop skill:
                         evidence-bound manual QA per success criterion, atomic commits
Phase 2: PR Creation   → Push, create a reviewer-readable English PR targeting dev
Phase 3: Verify Loop   → Unbounded iteration; a failing gate routes back to Phase 1:
  ├─ Gate A: CI         → gh pr checks (bun test, typecheck, build)
  └─ Gate B: Cubic      → cubic-dev-ai[bot] "No issues found"
                         (SKIPPED, not failed, when Cubic's quota is exhausted)
Phase 4: Merge         → Auto-merge by default; wait until actually merged, then worktree cleanup

Phase 0: Setup

Create a fresh isolated worktree for each PR before implementation starts. The user's main working directory is read-only context — it may have uncommitted work, and a branch checkout would destroy it. Isolation also makes parallelism cheap: one worktree per PR, so several build at once without colliding.

1. Decide the PR split

Before creating anything, decompose the task into the smallest atomic PRs that each compile, pass, and deliver one reviewable slice. Prefer more small PRs over one large one — a 200-line PR gets a real review; a 2000-line PR gets a rubber stamp. Sequence by dependency: independent slices branch off the base and run in parallel; dependent slices stack, each branched off the previous.

Building more than one independent PR concurrently is the recommended default, not an exotic option:

• Subagents — dispatch one background subagent per PR, each owning its own worktree, branch, and the full Phase 0→4 lifecycle.
• Team — for larger fan-outs, form a team (team_mode) and assign one member per PR.

When the work is large enough to need a plan (ulw-plan), this decomposition is not optional polish: the plan MUST encode the atomic PRs, their dependency order, and which run in parallel as first-class structure.