v0.2.0 — Contribution Lifecycle and Salvage Gate

PCF v0.2.0 adds an offline, fail-closed way to reason about contributions after upstream has moved.

Contribution lifecycle gate

The new pcf lifecycle command decomposes a contribution into atomic claims and distinguishes:

• CURRENT_AND_APPLICABLE
• DRIFTED_BUT_REBASEABLE
• SALVAGEABLE_INVARIANT
• PARTIALLY_SUPERSEDED
• SUPERSEDED_EQUIVALENT
• INVALIDATED
• NEEDS_MAINTAINER_DECISION

Each result includes a controlled next action, claim-level reasoning, and—when appropriate—a bounded salvage packet. JSON, Markdown, and plain-text output are available without network access or GitHub writes.

Hindsight boundary

Later outcomes and attribution may be recorded as provenance, but they are excluded from the observation-time classification and assessment SHA-256. Removing the later outcome from the retrospective Hermes Agent fixture produces the same decision and fingerprint.

This release does not claim that a lifecycle assessment proves correctness, mergeability, maintainer endorsement, or permission to publish.

Verification

• 274/274 unit and integration tests
• 77/77 maintainer benchmark cases
• 29/29 adversarial cases
• maintainer demo and MCP no-write smoke passed
• published package exposes pcf, premature-contribution-firewall, and pcf-mcp
• registry-installed lifecycle CLI reproduced the expected assessment hash
• registry-installed MCP server exposed 25 tools and no write-like tools

Install or run

npx premature-contribution-firewall@0.2.0 lifecycle lifecycle-input.json

Feature PR: #13
Release PR: #14

v0.1.3 - Serious scouting and authority hardening

PCF v0.1.3 adds impact-first serious candidate scouting and hardens the authority boundaries that keep automation advisory.

Highlights

• Added broad, read-only serious candidate scouting with explicit collection-integrity and open-PR-overlap gates.
• Expanded the adversarial residue corpus from 15 to 29 cases covering Unicode/control-text evasion, overlap ownership, repository-context vacuum, lane-gate omission, repro laundering, malformed MCP frames, and malformed batch inputs.
• Made repository context, lane persistence, repro evidence, and MCP framing fail closed when evidence is missing or malformed.
• Published through GitHub OIDC trusted publishing with npm provenance; no reusable npm token was required.

Verification

• Tests: 242/242
• Deterministic benchmark: 77/77
• Adversarial red test: 29/29
• Maintainer demo: PASS, replay stable, 0 regressions
• MCP smoke: PASS
• npm package dry run: PASS, 75 files
• Clean registry install: PASS for pcf and pcf-mcp
• Installed MCP surface: 25 tools, serious scout present, GitHub writes disabled

Main verification: https://github.com/VrtxOmega/premature-contribution-firewall/actions/runs/29156257898

Trusted publish: https://github.com/VrtxOmega/premature-contribution-firewall/actions/runs/29156361509

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/premature-contribution-firewall/v/0.1.3

Try It

npx -y -p premature-contribution-firewall@0.1.3 pcf --help
npx -y -p premature-contribution-firewall@0.1.3 pcf-mcp

PCF remains advisory. Heuristic results do not prove correctness, mergeability, authorship, or maintainer endorsement, and the MCP server exposes no public GitHub write tools.

v0.1.1 — npx CLI, contributor preflight, PR gate

What's new

• npm package: npx premature-contribution-firewall — zero-install CLI for evaluate, queue, setup, and preflight
• Contributor preflight: pcf preflight <payload.json|patch> checks review readiness before you submit. Exit 0 = ready, 1 = not ready with a fix-first checklist. Patch/mbox auto-detected (kernel-grade profile)
• PR Gate Action mode: on pull_request events the Action now evaluates the triggering PR, writes the verdict to the job step summary, and exposes status/score/ready outputs. Optional fail-on: never|low-review-value|needs-repair blocking — defaults to report-only
• Still dry-run by default: no comments, labels, or GitHub writes

Verification

69/69 benchmark, 11/11 adversarial red test, full test suite green.

PCF checks review readiness, not correctness or authorship.

v0.1.0 - Read-only maintainer queue pilot

PCF v0.1.0: Read-Only Maintainer Queue Pilot

Premature Contribution Firewall v0.1.0 is a read-only pilot for maintainers who are drowning in public GitHub issues and pull requests.

It is not an AI-authorship detector. It does not try to guess who or what wrote a contribution. It asks the maintainer question that matters:

Is this contribution reviewable, reproducible, scoped, tested, and worth human attention right now?

Try It Without Granting Write Access

The lowest-friction path is a manual GitHub Action run. It uses read-only permissions and uploads one markdown queue artifact.

name: PCF dry-run

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  issues: read
  pull-requests: read

jobs:
  queue:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Run PCF
        uses: VrtxOmega/premature-contribution-firewall@v0.1.0
        with:
          github-token: ${{ github.token }}
          limit: 25

      - name: Upload queue artifact
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v7
        with:
          name: pcf-queue
          path: pcf-queue.md
          if-no-files-found: error

That run forces dry-run mode:

• PCF_DRY_RUN=true
• PCF_POST_COMMENTS=false
• PCF_APPLY_LABELS=false
• PCF_COLLECT_REPOSITORY_CONTEXT=true

PCF does not comment, label, close, merge, or mutate GitHub state in this pilot path.

Full Action usage: docs/GITHUB_ACTION.md

What The Artifact Gives You

The queue is sorted by maintainer action, not by blame:

Lane	Who acts next	Maintainer move
review-now	maintainer	Start normal review now.
ask-reporter-for-evidence	reporter	Send a focused repair request.
check-duplicate-or-fixed-first	maintainer	Check duplicate, solved, concurrent, or upstream-fixed work first.
route-to-subsystem-or-process	maintainer/process	Move it to the right owner, template, repo, or process.
needs-maintainer-decision	maintainer	Make the judgment call without pretending the reporter can fix it.
not-actionable-yet	external state	Wait for release, stale-state cleanup, upstream answer, or another missing event.

Each item includes the route reason, next actor, maintainer action, top labels/checks, repository-context summary, review-budget estimate, and a dry-run response draft. Reporter-owned lanes get a copyable repair-request draft; maintainer-owned lanes get an internal note.

Inspect A Real Sample First

Before installing anything, inspect the canonical dogfood artifact generated from PCF's own public queue:

docs/MAINTAINER_EXPORT_SAMPLE.md

That sample includes:

• queue markdown
• dry-run response drafts
• artifact hashes
• rerun commands
• safety posture
• explicit non-claims

The raw replay capture stayed private under /tmp; only hash-verifiable maintainer output was committed.

Proof Gates

The release is gated locally and remotely.

Current public proof:

• Local npm run ci:gates: 147/147 tests, 69/69 benchmark, 11/11 adversarial red test, maintainer demo PASS.
• GitHub Actions PCF Verification run 26716892269: success on 6b19ea0a0a95351230f5e242472c02d88c1e08de.
• Canonical sample artifact is committed and linked from the README and Action docs.

Remote run: PCF Verification 26716892269

What This Release Does Not Claim

• PCF is not an AI-authorship detector.
• PCF is not a replacement for maintainer judgment.
• PCF does not prove a patch is correct, secure, or mergeable.
• PCF does not claim endorsement from any target maintainer, the Linux kernel project, Linus Torvalds, or any other project.
• PCF does not enable GitHub comments, labels, closures, merges, or other writes by default.

The point of v0.1.0 is simple: give maintainers a safe way to compress a messy queue into a reviewable action map, then let them decide whether the map is useful.

For the build-history evidence capsule behind this release, see docs/BUILD_ARC_36_HOURS.md.