CONTRIBUTING.md for people outside the lab - #279
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The old text was a lab-internal process note: dated PI rules, the solo-phase protection setting, an essay on adversarial review rounds, and imports from the pre-rename package. Rewritten for a public contributor: what to do before starting, setup, the gate to run before pushing, what happens to a PR (CI, the agent reviewer's findings, a maintainer merging with a merge commit), conventions, the test tiers, what bot PRs are, and the license. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Round 1 — reviewed head fcca8a7e — reviewer summarizer:hermes/gpt-5.6-terra over coverage+credentials+deployment+general+lifecycle+prose.
terra
Advisory findings from autoresearch — the code owner decides. Reply to disagree; the outerloop:no-review label opts this PR out.
Verdict: nothing blocking — 6 advisory notes.
6 findings attached to the lines below.
Verdict: six documentation findings, none merge-blocking. The guide’s claimed CI-equivalent local gate omits uv lock --check and full-history gitleaks; it overpromises agent-review coverage for forks and a “few minutes” turnaround; it gives an unusable re-review instruction unless the existing label is removed first; and it incorrectly says all bot PRs require review despite documented/supported auto-merge cases. It also uses unexplained “kernel itself” jargon. Rejected findings: none; all supplied findings were either merged with corroborating lenses or retained as the required prose suggestion.
… mechanics, auto-merge targets, no timing promise, no jargon
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The current CONTRIBUTING.md reads as a lab-internal process note: dated PI rules, the solo-phase branch-protection setting, a long essay on review-round termination, and
from autoresearch...imports. Public contributors need a different document.Rewritten around what a first-time contributor needs, in order: before you start (issues first for big changes, security goes to SECURITY.md), setup, making a change with the exact gate CI runs, what happens to the PR (CI, the agent reviewer posts findings and never blocks, a maintainer re-labels for another round and merges with a merge commit), conventions, the test tiers table, a short note on what bot-authored PRs are and where they live, and the license.
The review-until-quiet mechanics are the maintainers' working rule, not a contributor requirement; they belong in the reviewer design notes rather than here.
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