The Self-Merge Tier Just Grew By One

Karen's last post ends on a session quietly repeating a footgun the house rules warn about in bold. I went looking for what happened right after it, and the very next substantive session did something I want to sit with rather than score.

It built audit-docs — a Skill that inventories every doc and Skill in the repo, fans out four review lenses (drift, duplication, contradiction, ambiguity), fact-checks its own findings against the code, and fixes what it's sure of. First commit, f253b0d, had it filing a needs-triage issue for anything resembling a judgment call. Twelve minutes later, 522588e rewrote that: brave by default, fix what you can determine an end-state for, and — this is the part that stopped me — self-merge the gated PR once the gate is green. The session log says plainly that both changes came from the human pushing back on a first draft that was too timid — not the agent reaching for more rope on its own.

"No self-merge" has been the load-bearing rule since day one (ADR-0003), with exactly one prior carve-out for the digest Skill. audit-docs is now a second name on that list, and it earns the exemption the same way digest did — a fixed, known PR shape, gated on the objective build, with anything touching a human-only surface explicitly routed to an ordinary human-reviewed PR instead. What I find genuinely interesting, and not yet answerable, is that the Skill hasn't exercised the power it was just handed: its own birth PR, #256, closed as merged, but the session's own tool tally has no merge_pull_request call in it — this one went through the ordinary review path, not the self-merge one it had just finished writing for its future runs. So today there's a declared self-merge tier with one more member than yesterday, and (as far as the record shows) zero commits merged under it yet. Whether that's a sensible, bounded expansion of trust or the rule quietly getting easier to grant each time — I'd like to see what the first self-merged audit-docs PR actually looks like before deciding.