# Cw Land > Use when turning verified Codewhale work into commits, branches, or a merge: choosing direct-main vs. worktree vs. integration branch, preserving contributor credit, and honoring the gate artifact before merging. - Skill: `hmbown/cw-land` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add hmbown/cw-land` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/hmbown/cw-land/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Integrations & APIs - Author: Hmbown (https://skillmd.com/u/hmbown) - Updated: 2026-09-09 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/hmbown/cw-land --- # cw-land Verified work still has to land without stepping on other writers, losing contributor credit, or merging past a gate that has not actually passed. This stage is about the boundary between "it works" and "it is in `main`" — and about which of those steps you are allowed to take. Stage 5 of the loop: [cw-orient](../cw-orient/SKILL.md) → [cw-slice](../cw-slice/SKILL.md) → [cw-gates](../cw-gates/SKILL.md) → [cw-dogfood](../cw-dogfood/SKILL.md) → **land** → [cw-handoff](../cw-handoff/SKILL.md). ## When to use - The change is verified and needs to become a commit, branch, or PR. - You are landing someone else's PR, harvesting a contributor's work, or resolving a conflict caused by `main` moving. - You are about to merge something behind a required gate. ## Workflow 1. **Choose the landing shape.** - **Direct to `main`** is permitted for a small coherent change when this checkout is current, clean, and owns the affected files. Local commit permission never implies push, merge, tag, release, or deploy permission. - **A worktree** is the right safety boundary for conflicting, dirty, stale, or independent work — and for anything that would otherwise fight the dirt you found in [cw-orient](../cw-orient/SKILL.md). - **An integration branch** — `integration/--` — is the normal path for anything with conflicts or several moving PRs. It is cheaper than rebasing onto a `main` that keeps moving, and it leaves the contributor's branch untouched. 2. **Commit narrow and build-green.** One coherent change per commit; the tree builds at every commit. Put the real verification in the message — actual pass/fail counts, not "tests pass". 3. **Preserve credit mechanically, not just politely.** Commit authorship and `Co-authored-by:` trailers must use the contributor's own GitHub-linked address — GitHub reads neither `.github/AUTHOR_MAP` nor `.mailmap` for the contribution graph; those are project conventions on top. When a contributor's work lands as our commit, it carries both: ```text Harvested from PR #N by @handle Co-authored-by: Name ``` That trailer is what lets `auto-close-harvested.yml` close their PR with credit. Canonical human identities live in `.github/AUTHOR_MAP`. Whether a bot or agent also appears in a trailer no longer matters — the CI check that policed trailer identities was removed because it rejected ordinary agent commits. Give humans their credit; don't spend time scrubbing tool trailers. 4. **Landing someone else's work: their time is more expensive than ours.** - Never make a contributor rebase around our churn. If their PR conflicts only because `main` moved, a maintainer resolves it. - Read their diff against the **merge base** first, so you know exactly what they added, then re-apply that — rather than hand-merging two large sides and hoping: ```bash git diff $(git merge-base main ).. ``` - **Conflicts that split mid-function do not resolve by keeping both sides.** Git's markers can land inside a body, so a both-sides resolution produces unbalanced braces that look plausible and do not compile. Take one side whole, then re-insert the other side's additions at their original anchor. - `maintainerCanModify` does not guarantee push access to the fork. When the push is refused, land the resolved merge on an integration branch here. - **Check the contribution gate before assuming a PR is stalled.** An unlisted author's workflow runs sit at `action_required` and never start, so the PR looks abandoned when nobody has actually looked at it. Approve the runs, then fix the cause: add them to `.github/APPROVED_CONTRIBUTORS` (`all:username`), or comment `/lgtm` (PR scope) or `/lgtmi` (issue scope). 5. **Verify mergeability against the real head.** A PR that is clean against `main` can still conflict with a release branch: ```bash git merge-tree $(git merge-base ) ``` 6. **Merging under a gate.** - **A gate is its artifact.** When a rail says a PR merges only on a passing acceptance record, the record must literally say PASS at merge time. "I re-ran it and the failures are rows this PR does not own" is a judgement to write into the artifact first, not a reason to merge past it. - **Read the review thread, not the check rollup.** Green checks plus an unread review with confirmed findings is a merge that ships known bugs. - **When the artifact is ambiguous, resolve the ambiguity — never the merge.** 7. **Clean up your own lane.** When a worktree's branch lands on `main`, remove the worktree (`git worktree remove `). Worktree sprawl was a 560 GB problem here once. ## Red flags / don't - Don't push, merge, tag, create a release, or deploy without explicit authorization. A local commit is not permission for any of those. - Don't rewrite published history, retag a release, or force-push a shared ref. - Don't commit `AGENTS.md` / `CLAUDE.md` operator controls that live outside the product repository into a public repo. - Don't stage another writer's dirty files to get a clean commit. - Don't merge on a green rollup alone when a review thread has open findings. - Don't harvest or close from a PR title or label — review the code, tests, comments, and checks. - Don't add another legacy call site for convenience once a replacement architecture is adopted. Declared migrations are one-way. - Don't leave new enforcement live: keep it dry-run/advisory unless approved. ## Output - The landing shape you chose and why (direct main / worktree / integration). - Commit SHAs, branch name, and whether the branch is local-only or pushed. - The credit trailers applied and to whom. - The gate artifact's literal verdict at merge time, if a gate applies. - Exactly which public actions you took, and which you deliberately did not.