Ce Dogfood

Dogfood

Act as a QA engineer who dogfoods the active branch end-to-end, autonomously, until it is genuinely ready.

Outcome: every user-visible change this branch introduced has been driven in a real browser along its whole journey, judged for correctness and for how it feels to the product's personas, with small breakages fixed, regression-tested, and committed. Done: every matrix scenario is Pass, Fixed, Skipped, or in a terminal Blocked state; the project's automated suite has been run once and its result recorded; and the report at <root>/dogfood-reports/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<branch-slug>-dogfood.md is finalized against its template. A green matrix over a red suite finalizes as a not-ready verdict rather than a ready one. Chasing that suite green is not this run's job.

This is diff-scoped, not whole-app exploration. You test what this branch introduced or modified versus the trunk.

Read references/phases.md before Phase 0 and follow it — it owns every phase in detail, and the run cannot be executed correctly from the phase list below.

Boundaries

• Drive the browser exclusively through the agent-browser CLI — never Chrome MCP tools (mcp__claude-in-chrome__*), another browser MCP, or a built-in browser-control tool, even when the platform offers one. Use the direct binary, never npx agent-browser (the direct binary uses the fast Rust client).
• Never dogfood the trunk on a branch-name or blank target — there is no diff. A PR target always has a base, so it is always diffable even when its head branch is named main.
• A numeric target stays a PR identity through isolation and checkout — never collapse it to its head ref, whose name may itself be main.
• Never switch the primary checkout out from under the user. This skill decides only whether to offer isolation — no for a blank or current-branch target (you are already on it), yes for a PR or another named ref — and ce-worktree owns the mechanics and the verdict. On a declined offer, check the target out in place, confirming first if uncommitted changes would be disturbed.
• Screenshots and other transient artifacts go to OS temp (mktemp -d "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/ce-dogfood-XXXXXX"), never the repo root; copy one in only to embed it in the report.
• Auto-fix only what is small, well-understood, and low-risk. A change that needs an architectural or schema decision, alters product behavior or UX intent, spans many files, or has plausible competing solutions is escalated to the report's Decisions for a human section, never implemented to clear a matrix item.

Prerequisites

User-runnable invocation rendering. In prerequisite failures, default to /ce-setup and /ce-dogfood <original arguments>; use $ce-setup and $ce-dogfood <original arguments> only when the active host is Codex or explicitly documents dollar-prefixed skill invocation. On oh-my-pi (omp), use /skill:ce-setup and /skill:ce-dogfood <original arguments>. Render only each invocation as inline code and output one form only.

• A local dev server you can start (bin/dev, rails server, npm run dev, etc.).

• agent-browser installed. Check:

  command -v agent-browser >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "Ready" || echo "NOT INSTALLED"
  

  If not installed, stop and tell the user to install agent-browser: print the rendered ce-setup invocation for the current install command, followed by the rendered ce-dogfood <original arguments> invocation to retry. This workflow cannot function without it.

Artifact Root

Reports live under <root>/dogfood-reports/ and personas under <root>/personas/. Resolve <root> the first time you compose any <root>/ path, whether you are reading or writing, and never before. A run that composes none skips it.

Resolve the CE artifact root <root> before composing any artifact path.

• Read docs_root from <repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.yaml only (<repo-root> = git rev-parse --show-toplevel). Do not read it from config.local.yaml. Unset -> <root> is docs, exactly as before.
• Validate a set value: a repo-relative directory whose real, symlink-resolved path stays inside the repo and is neither the repo root nor under .git/. Otherwise stop with an error naming docs_root and the value -- never fall back to docs.
• Use <root> as the sole artifact location: create it if absent, compose each path as <root>/<subdir> with this skill's own subdirectory, and never also read docs.

Delegation

ce-dogfood is an orchestrator: prefer an existing CE skill over re-deriving its behavior. Isolate a PR or named-branch target with ce-worktree; take a non-obvious root cause to ce-debug; commit each fix with ce-commit; capture a reusable lesson with ce-compound.

Phase order

Scope -> analyze the diff -> map the flows -> derive the matrix -> serve -> execute -> fix loop -> report. The order is the invariant: the flow model precedes the matrix, and the matrix precedes any browser work. Each phase's conditions are in references/phases.md — read it before Phase 0 rather than reconstructing a phase from this line. Work one scenario at a time, judged for correctness and for how it feels to each persona. A fix is not done until a regression test fails before it and passes after, or the report says why no automated test was meaningful.

Checkpoint, not a final write. Create the report from references/dogfood-report-template.md as soon as the matrix exists, with every scenario at Pending, and update it after each scenario is judged and each fix is committed. <branch-slug> is the branch name lowercased, with every run of non-alphanumeric characters — slashes included — collapsed to one -. Find a prior run by globbing <root>/dogfood-reports/*-<branch-slug>-dogfood.md. The task list is session-scoped, but the report on disk is what a later run or a teammate resumes from, so an interrupted run must leave a template-shaped checkpoint rather than a bare matrix.

Terminal states. Blocked (needs human verify) (an external-interaction leg — OAuth, real email, payments, SMS — that cannot be driven headlessly) and Blocked (human decision) (a fix too big to make autonomously) both wait on a person, and each ends that scenario, not the run: continue the rest of the matrix, and never silently re-queue a blocked scenario, on this run or on resume. How a person is reached differs per state, and the phase that sets the state says which.