board-pilot

board-pilot

A generic, board-driven implementation pipeline. It watches a GitHub Project, and when a human drags an item into the trigger column it drives that item autonomously — stage by stage, each stage a Bridge primitive — to a human-gated draft pull request, then stops. No project specifics live in the engine; a project declares its own pipeline in config. The same engine runs a heavy project (full implement→verify→review) and a light one (a two-stage doc edit) unchanged.

What it is NOT. Not a merge bot, not a board-sync tool (that is tracker-sync), not a write executor for board fields (that is github-projects-manager). board-pilot only advances an item to a draft PR and hands the merge decision back to a human.

Mental model

• Poller-fast / worker-slow split. A cheap cron tick (Engine.tick()) runs often (~1 min). It contains no LLM — it only reads the board, arms new items, and advances each in-flight item by exactly one stage under a per-item lock. The slow work (a claude -p implement run, a workflow harness) happens inside a dispatched stage; the next tick re-reads the board to confirm before advancing again (confirmed-advance). A 1-minute poll therefore never double-dispatches a 20-minute job.

• Decision A — engine-owned Pipeline vs human-owned Status. Each board item carries two fields:

  • Status — the human lifecycle column (e.g. Backlog → Ready → Ready for Development → In Progress → Blocked → In Review → Done). A person owns it; dragging an item into the configured trigger column (trigger.on_status) is the only arm signal the engine reads. Which field this is (board.status_field) and which value arms are both config — the engine hardcodes neither. It writes working_status / park_status / pr_status here, but arming never depends on them.
  • Pipeline — the engine's program counter (queued → implementing → verifying → … → pr-open). The engine owns it. Once an item is armed, the engine tracks progress through Pipeline and ignores further Status moves, so a human shuffling cards mid-flight cannot corrupt the state machine. Pipeline is also the durable arm marker: arming is gated on pipeline is None, so a wiped snapshot can never re-arm an in-flight item.