Ship

Close the minerva lifecycle by committing outstanding work to a branch, opening a PR titled and described from the active work unit's proposal.md, watching CI to green with a bounded auto-fix loop (3 iterations), and enabling auto-merge when repo permissions allow. The watch never blocks the agent and never guesses a polling interval: a detached gh pr checks --watch resumes the run when checks actually settle, and a long re-arming ScheduleWakeup stays armed underneath so the watch survives a dead watcher, a wedged check, or an ended session.

Usage

• minerva:ship — ships the work unit inferred from current-session context, or the most-recently-modified if context is ambiguous, or runs in bare mode if no work unit is found
• minerva:ship 005-add-payments — ship the named unit explicitly
• minerva:ship <date-slug> --auto=<orchestrator> — orchestrated mode; see Orchestrated mode below

Orchestrated mode (--auto)

Mode argument: --auto

--auto=<orchestrator> is an observable signal that an autonomous orchestrator is driving this run. Act on the argument — never on a judgment about who is calling (2026-06-07-decision-phase-handoff-rides-observable-intake). It does three things:

• Hard gates #1 and #2 (commit message, PR title + body) accept their drafts without prompting.
• The CI-watch wake-up carries the caller, so the orchestrator survives the wait.
• The final report hands control back to <orchestrator>'s Phase 7 — but only when this run resumed from ship's own CI-watch wake-up, because that is precisely when the orchestrator's turn already ended and its Phase 6 will never resume. On a synchronous return the orchestrator continues to Phase 7 itself. Exactly one of the two paths runs; doing both runs the cleanup gate twice. Without the wake-up path the run ends inside ship and the cleanup gate never fires — the failure 2026-08-07-pattern-deferred-work-needs-a-trigger-not-an-assumption describes.

Absent the argument every gate behaves exactly as written.

Pre-flight checks

Bail with a clear, one-line message on any failure:

1. Git repo. git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree returns true.
2. gh CLI available and authenticated. gh auth status exits 0.
3. Something to ship. At least one of:
   • git status --porcelain is non-empty (staged, unstaged, or untracked changes), or
   • the current branch has commits ahead of the default branch.
4. Not a no-op. If currently on the default branch with zero commits ahead and no local changes, there is nothing to ship — stop.

Protocol

The full step protocols live verbatim in references/protocol.md — read it now, before executing: Target resolution → Worktree addressing → Phase resolution (a unit declaring ## Phases ships one PR per phase; unphased units — the normal case — are unaffected) → Default-branch detection → Branch creation → Commit outstanding changes (Hard gate #1: commit message confirmation) → Push & open PR (Hard gate #2: PR title + body confirmation) → CI watch & auto-fix loop (detached gh pr checks --watch plus an armed re-arming ScheduleWakeup fallback; bounded 3-iteration auto-fix) → Auto-merge → Final report, plus Lifecycle nudges and Worktree handling.

Idempotency

Ship does not write its own metadata file or append a ## Shipped marker to scratchpad.md. The PR URL lives on GitHub; nothing minerva-side needs to remember it. Re-running on a branch that already has an open PR will detect that (gh pr view) and pick up at the CI-watch step instead of re-creating.

Wake-ups re-invoke minerva:ship; the skill detects the existing PR and resumes the watch loop using the iteration count carried in the wake-up prompt.

Out of scope

• Writing to .minerva/knowledge/ directly. All durable knowledge goes through minerva:promote.
• Running minerva:promote or minerva:review automatically. Only nudges, never auto-invokes — keeps the user in control of what gets promoted and reviewed.
• Worktree cleanup. Owned by minerva:cleanup.
• A strict mode that turns nudges into hard blockers. Deferred; users who want strict ordering can run the skills in order themselves.
• Replacing ship-it for non-minerva projects. This skill assumes a .minerva/ project or runs in explicit bare mode; the generic ship-it skill is still the right tool when the user is not in a minerva project.