bostonaholic PR watch mechanics
The cycle timing, bound, and handoff every PR watch loop runs. A consuming
skill owns what each cycle does; this skill owns how the loop is paced,
bounded, and ended. pr-watch-as-author and pr-watch-as-reviewer both
load it.
A consumer binds three slots and nothing else:
| Slot | What the consumer supplies |
|---|---|
| Poll command | The command its own poll step runs. |
| Cycle-0 subject | What an already-satisfied condition at arm time means for it. |
| Handoff state | The fields its handoff prints. |
The loop is bounded, never infinite
Cycle 0 polls immediately — the condition that already holds at arm time is handled at once, on the consumer's cycle-0 subject.
Each later cycle is one backgrounded Bash call that sleeps the interval and then runs the consumer's poll command, so the cycle costs one turn and the poll output is in hand when the harness reports the call:
sleep 1860; <the poll command>Run it with
run_in_background: true. Perprinciple-non-blocking-waits, a foreground wait is killed at the harness ceiling (600 s in Claude Code) and spends a turn per fragment.Soft cap: 3 cycles (
90 minutes). At cycle 3, if nothing has stopped the loop already, end the interactive session — do not sleep again. Print a handoff: the consumer's handoff state and the exact command to resume the watch as a scheduled headless job — the scheduled pr-watch job (`/dotfiles/bin/pr-watch.sh`, run from launchd). Re-arming the interactive loop happens only on explicit user request; the loop does not re-arm itself.The bound is the invariant, not the interval: 3 cycles at ~31 minutes. Where a harness offers no background execution, say so and chunk the wait into foreground sleeps sized under that harness's ceiling — the cycle count is what must hold.
The cap convention is principle-bounded-loops: declare the
bound with the loop; hitting it is a loud, terminal, reported outcome.
Stop conditions this skill owns
Three stop conditions are loop mechanics rather than consumer actions, and each is reported by name:
- User interrupt — the escape hatch. Pressing Esc or sending a message stops the loop between Bash calls at any time.
- 3-cycle soft cap — print the handoff above and end the interactive loop.
- 3 consecutive poll failures — stop and name the error.
A consumer adds its own terminal conditions (an approval, a merge or close, a state its gate depends on) and reports them the same way. It never restates the three above.