PR Review & Deliverables

Nested lingtai-dev-guide reference. Read this after the top-level router sends you here to prepare a PR for review, build its human-facing explainer, and run review gates before asking for a merge.

It consolidates the PR-review-gate, HTML-explainer, deliverable-template, and release-style-audit practices, covering preparing and reviewing PRs and their human deliverables. Release publication is outside this bundled guide — use the dedicated release owner available in the maintainer's environment.

Core principle

A PR is review-ready only when (1) the diff is clean and validated, (2) a self-contained HTML explainer tells the human the story, and (3) the change has passed at least one independent review pass. Opening, editing, and merging PRs are external side effects: do them only after an explicit maintainer authorization for that side effect.

1. PR readiness gate

• ] Clean diff: git diff --check (no trailing whitespace / conflict markers).
• ] Targeted tests for the changed area pass; record commands and results.
• ] If you touched utility/dev-guide skills, the nested-reference tests and the

root router catalog/routing table were updated in the same commit.

• ] Anatomy travels with code: any moved/renamed/split file cited by an

ANATOMY.md is updated in the same commit.

• ] No secrets, tokens, or private absolute paths in the diff or the explainer.
• ] A self-contained HTML explainer exists (see §3).

Known repo pitfalls: docs/stars/stars.csv may use CRLF intentionally — do not "normalize" it; and portal tests may need frontend assets built first (npm --prefix portal/web run build).

2. Independent review passes (gates, not permission)

Run at least one independent, read-only review pass before merge. Strongest first:

1. Multi-model / daemon review. Generate a diff prompt and have a read-only

daemon (Claude Code / Codex) or a second model review correctness, scope, and regressions. Save the review as an artifact so it is auditable. Run API-backed reviewers with keys from the environment (<API_KEY_ENV>), never inline.

1. Claude review gate. A focused Claude Code review of the diff for

correctness bugs and reuse/simplification cleanups.

1. Self review against the readiness gate (§1).

Treat each review as input, not a verdict: read the diff yourself (it is ground truth, not the daemon's summary), classify each finding (confirmed defect, edge risk, future refactor, doc/process note), and fix the smallest thing that resolves a real defect. Do not expand into a broad refactor because nearby code is related.

These reviews are gates, not authorization to merge — see §5.

3. Self-contained local HTML explainer

Every non-trivial PR ships one self-contained .html explainer for the human. This is the canonical statement of the requirement; other dev-guide references point here rather than restating it.

Local-only by default. Routine PR explainers are local output, not repo artifacts. Write to an ignored location — artifacts/pr<NUMBER>-<slug>-explainer.html, reports/pr<NUMBER>-<slug>-explainer.html, tmp/<topic>-<date>.html, or the agent/worktree report workspace — and hand the human the absolute file://-openable path in the short pointer message. Do not commit routine explainers. Commit one only when the human explicitly asks, when it is a release/long-term reference artifact, or when repo documentation links to it deliberately; use git add -f for that exception and explain the reason in the PR.

Naming and timing. Name it pr<NUMBER>-<slug>-explainer.html once the PR exists; pre-push use <topic>-<date>.html and rename locally after. Write it before asking for review or merge, and refresh it when blockers or fixes materially change the story.

Required sections, in order: TL;DR / conclusion-first, baseline, what-was-done (with diff snippets), validation (commands + results), risks/decisions, next steps, and a source index. Plain text/Markdown is reserved for the short pointer message and conversational replies.

The only exception is a strictly one-line docs/chore PR where the human has explicitly waived the report. Absent that waiver, write the HTML even for a small fix; if a change is too small for a useful explainer, that is a signal to bundle it with related work.

Deliverable hygiene (any human-facing HTML)

• Conclusion first, then evidence. Label every nontrivial claim with its

source (file path, command, commit SHA, PR/issue number).

• De-private. Repo-relative paths and generic placeholders

(<your-lingtai-checkout>); redact tokens/keys/chat IDs as <REDACTED>.

• Self-contained & valid. Single file, inline CSS, no remote assets, no build

step. Sanity-check the markup before handing it over so a malformed tag does not silently swallow content. For the HTML skeleton, MathJax setup, and the full validation checklist, read ~/.lingtai-tui/utilities/swiss-knife/reference/html-report/SKILL.md (or load the swiss-knife skill and route to html-report) — it owns those mechanics. The PR-specific path, naming, and section rules above still govern.

4. PR body hygiene and gh pr edit

The PR body cites the issue, summarizes the change, and lists validation steps, mirroring the explainer's TL;DR and validation without duplicating the whole HTML. Keep body and explainer in sync when fixes land.

gh pr edit can emit GraphQL deprecation warnings on some gh versions — those are warnings, not failures. If gh pr edit --body-file is noisy, re-run or set the body via the web UI; treat it as a version-dependent troubleshooting note, not a blocker.

5. Maintainer authorization boundaries

Do not, without an explicit imperative authorization for that specific side effect:

• open or merge PRs, push commits, or force-push;
• file/close issues, close/delete branches or other resources;
• edit a PR body on the remote.

Generating diffs, running read-only reviews, and writing local explainers are always allowed. When approval wording is ambiguous, show the maintainer the final candidate refs/diff and ask before mutating GitHub state. For consequential releases (tagging, publishing to PyPI/Homebrew, website release archive/blog), use the maintainer environment's dedicated release owner; this reference grants no publication authority.

Related references

• reference/contributing/SKILL.md — issue → worktree → PR → merge loop and

daemon decomposition.

• reference/skill-stewardship/SKILL.md — PR-ready cleanup when the change adds

or edits a skill.

• skills-manual — generic skill authoring (when the deliverable is a skill).