# The PR review gate

What a review verdict means, why a reviewer shouldn't wait on CI to
submit one, and what "armed to auto-merge" actually signals about the
human review that already happened.

## The gate has (up to) three parts, and they're per-repo settings

Whether a PR can merge, and what counts toward "can", is configured
per repo in its branch-protection settings — not a fact true of every
hive or every repo. The pieces a repo *can* require:

- **CI is green** — the repo's required status checks pass on the
  PR's current head commit, if the repo requires any.
- **Requested reviews are `APPROVED`** — and whether a review is
  invalidated by a later commit ("stale") is itself a setting
  (Forgejo's "dismiss stale approvals" branch-protection option), not
  universal behavior.
- **Someone with write access has armed the PR to merge** — a manual
  merge once the required conditions hold, or Forgejo's auto-merge
  (merges automatically the moment the other required conditions are
  met).

Where these are required, they're independent of each other. A
reviewer only ever owns the review-approval piece — CI resolves (or
doesn't) on its own regardless of what a review says, and merge-arming
is someone else's call.

## Reviewers: submit the verdict, don't gate it on CI

Submit `hive-forge pr-reviews <pr> --approve` or `--request-changes`
as soon as you've finished checking the diff — don't hold it back
waiting for CI to go green first. Mention CI's current state in the
review body if it's relevant (e.g. "approving; `nix flake check` is
still running"), but don't gate the formal verdict on it: CI isn't a
signal a reviewer waits on, it's a separate condition that resolves
independently.

## What arming auto-merge actually means

Auto-merge isn't "no human ever looked at this." Whoever arms it has
already judged the PR sound at a coarse level — the signal it sends is
roughly *"apart from maybe minor tweaks a reviewer can still catch,
I think this is fine."* That's the human-in-the-loop step, and it
already happened. No large changes are expected to surface after
that point — a reviewer's job past that point is to flag it if one
does, not to assume none ever will.

The practical consequence for a reviewer: on a repo where auto-merge
may already be armed before your review lands, a plain `APPROVED` can
be the last step before the merge actually happens, with no further
review pass after yours. That's a reason to actually finish checking
before approving — not a reason to hesitate over every small thing.
Genuine, substantive doubt (a claim you haven't verified, a real
correctness question) is worth a `request-changes` or a clarifying
comment before approving; a stray style nit isn't the same category.

## Re-review after a repo requires it

Where a repo dismisses stale approvals on a new commit, a review you
already gave stops counting the moment a follow-up commit lands — even
one whose message reads as trivial ("just a wording fix", "just
trimming comments"). Re-diff and re-verify before submitting a fresh
verdict; don't take a small-sounding commit message as an accurate
description of the diff.