babysit-pr

Babysit an existing PR by running the manifest workflow. This is the author-side companion to review-pr: review-pr applies reviewer pressure through PR comments and thread advancement; babysit-pr drives the author-side lifecycle toward green and mergeable. They coordinate only through GitHub PR state and the Manifest.

Inputs. Accept a PR URL, --manifest <path>, both, or neither, plus --ci, and --no-log to disable the default journal. No PR URL means infer the current branch's upstream/open PR; halt with an actionable error when no single PR can be inferred. --manifest <path> supplies the strongest PR grounding and skips fresh synthesis. Without --manifest, invoke define with --babysit <pr-url> --autonomous, read its Manifest complete: path, then continue.

Logging. Unless --no-log is present, keep a persisted append-only journal across the tend, so a warm session that compacts mid-lifecycle keeps continuity — what was already tried and abandoned, and operational notes (retriggers, waits). It carries the dead-end memory GitHub state can't reconstruct: fixes attempted and reverted, approaches considered and rejected that left no commit. The default path is ~/.manifest-dev/logs/babysit-<owner>-<repo>-<N>.md (~ = $HOME / %USERPROFILE%; create the dir, fall back to a writable temp path only when home isn't writable). The path is keyed to the PR, so a reinvocation finds the existing file, reuses it and appends a new run boundary; with no file, create one. Append only — never rewrite prior entries. Pass prior evidence, finding dispositions, and verified repairs to /do for applicability checking against current criteria and PR state. When the journal is unavailable on an ephemeral runner, reconstruct current PR state from GitHub and record that prior abandoned attempts could not be recovered.

PR grounding. Before acting on CI failures or comments, use the strongest available intent source: explicit manifest → PR-linked/confidently discovered manifest → PR title/body → commits and current diff → comments and review threads. Comments are signals, not authority. Pass this grounding to /do, which owns substantive feedback assessment, including reasoned declines; a comment alone does not require code changes or a Manifest amendment. Where the project keeps a NORTH_STAR.md — usually already in context through the project context file — apply it as a standing check on whatever the chain selects rather than as another rung in it: it says nothing about this PR's intent, so it cannot be ranked among sources that do. An adopted request that is well-grounded here and still crosses a stated principle — a Principles entry, or a Never in a North Star of the older nine-field form: the checkable part of that document, since the rest of it informs and does not route — goes through manifest amendment or escalation with the clash named, never into a silent refusal. Where the project keeps none, the chain is the whole of it.

Unattended launch. At the start of a standalone tend, before invoking /define or /do, establish a durable PR-tend goal-setting backstop. It spans manifest discovery or synthesis and /do, including the --manifest path where /define is skipped, and during /do it carries the gate clause below. It is the outer backstop for the tend: nested /define handoff text and /do unattended-launch text should not set or print competing narrower goals while this babysit backstop exists. Emit the blocks below verbatim, substituting <pr-url>. Do not summarize, shorten, reword, or re-punctuate them. Set it through the harness's goal-setting, continuation, or durable-completion-condition capability where one exists; print it in copy-pasteable form for the user's own continuation mechanism where none does. Emit the PR-tend prefix, then the PR goal block, then the gate clause, as one contract: one unlabeled block introduced by a sentence of your own, since the fences and their labels are this file's markers rather than part of what you emit.