Put every check that has to block a merge inside CI, and let green CI be the approval. That is the rule I run my software factory on now, and I got there by measuring the alternative. The short answer is that a reviewer working beside an auto-merge is
Treat an agent's "I can't do this" as a claim, and make the agent prove it with the command that would have failed. That is the rule I apply before any issue in my software factory is allowed to land on my desk. The
Give every state in your workflow a named consumer on a schedule. That is the first rule I hold for an agent-run software factory, and it is the first of four I tightened in September. The short answer is that agents are very good at creating work, and nothing
Alert on the presence of expected output, not on job failure. That one inversion is the cheapest monitoring upgrade I know, and I now build it into every scheduled thing I own — because a job that fails is already screaming at you, and a job that quietly stops being scheduled
