/pr-queue-gate

Hook-carried skill for the deterministic PR-queue primitive and Claude Code session-end gate. The enforcing artifacts are scripts/pr-queue.sh and scripts/pr-queue-gate-hook.mjs.

Scope

The skill inspects the queue and enforces the gate.

Boundary

This skill owns:

• one-call GitHub queue inspection for a repository;
• the fleet-authored PR filter;
• CI/age normalization into stable JSON;
• one Stop-hook block per Claude session;
• fail-open ledger evidence for non-actionable or infrastructure states.

It does not own cmuxlayer lane-status/lane-closure enforcement (the separate status-claim lane), merge policy, review execution, or live installation.

Note: the pre-v0.4.35 set_status tool it used to name no longer exists, and the 9-tool surface has no replacement for agent-authored status/progress reporting — update_surface only does move and rename.

Primitive contract

skills/golem-powers/pr-queue-gate/scripts/pr-queue.sh [repo-path]

The default repo path is the current directory. Stdout is one compact JSON object:

{"repo":"golems","open":1,"oldest_days":3,"prs":[{"n":101,"title":"fix: example","age_d":3,"reviewDecision":"REVIEW_REQUIRED","ci":"passing"}]}

Exit codes:

• 0: no open fleet PRs;
• 3: one or more open fleet PRs;
• 2: git/remote/gh/JSON infrastructure error, printed to stderr.

The primitive makes exactly one gh pr list call. jq filters, sorts, escapes titles, computes whole-day ages, and classifies rollups as passing, failing, or pending.

Fleet-authored filter

The 2026-08-04 live inventory across brainlayer, cmuxlayer, and golems showed that every open PR was authored by the repository owner; the observed branch prefixes were fix/, feat/, and hygiene/. The filter therefore includes a PR when either condition is true:

1. author.login equals the GitHub remote owner; or
2. headRefName matches ^(feat|fix|hygiene)/ case-insensitively and the head branch is owned by the repository owner and is not cross-repository.

The second clause keeps same-repository fleet automation while preventing an external fork from becoming a fleet PR merely by choosing a conventional branch name. Titles are treated as metadata: the Stop reason strips terminal and bidirectional display controls, collapses whitespace, truncates to 120 Unicode code points, and JSON-delimits the result before it enters model context.

Do not widen the branch regex from memory. Re-measure live fleet PRs and update the fixture plus this contract in the same reviewed PR.

Stop-hook contract

The hook accepts Claude Code Stop JSON on stdin and reads cwd plus session_id. It checks only the repository containing cwd, and acts only when that repository's origin is a github.com/EtanHey/* remote.

When the primitive exits 3, the hook atomically writes a SHA-256-keyed latch under state/, blocks once, lists every PR, and gives exactly three allowed dispositions:

• merge per /pr-loop --admin;
• review-routed:<who>;
• blocked:<real-blocker>.

The reason ends by directing the lane to post the disposition to its collab, then stop. Once the latch exists, later Stops in that session allow immediately without another GitHub call, including if new PRs appear later in the session. That session-wide one-shot trade-off is deliberate: preventing a Stop loop takes priority over repeated enforcement.

The latch is written before the block payload. If the process dies in the narrow gap between those writes, that session's one block is consumed without delivery. This deliberate fail-open ordering avoids the worse failure mode: emitting a block, failing to latch it, and trapping the seat in repeated Stop blocks.

All ambiguity and infrastructure failures fail open. The hook appends JSONL evidence to state/ledger.jsonl when possible; a ledger or latch error must never loop a seat.

Test and install

bun test skills/golem-powers/pr-queue-gate/evals/pr-queue-gate.test.mjs

The test suite initializes real fixture git repositories and mocks only the external gh process via PATH. It performs no live GitHub calls.

See INSTALL.md for the post-merge installed-copy procedure and install-snippet.json for the Stop-hook entry. Never self-install this gate from an unmerged branch.

Integration

• /pr-loop owns review, merge, and --admin authority.
• /never-fabricate requires fresh queue/test/PR evidence before claims.
• pr-queue-gate only removes session-end blindness; the cmuxlayer lane owns cross-engine status-claim refusal.