Babysit

Babysit PRs

Owns a PR end-to-end through review: ship it, wait for the automatic review round, and if it isn't already clean, drive fix → reply → resolve → re-review cycles until Greptile reports 5/5 and there are zero open comment threads, keeping the branch mergeable against staging along the way. Two bots review this repo — Greptile and cubic — and they behave differently; see "Two reviewers" below. Designed to be run under /loop (no fixed interval — let it self-pace on review latency) so it survives across multiple wakeups in the same session.

When to use

• The user says "babysit this PR", "keep working the reviews until it's clean", or similar
• As the natural follow-up to /ship when the user wants the review loop automated rather than manually re-triggering reviews and answering comments themselves

Inputs

Needs a PR number. If none is given and there's no open PR for the current branch, run /ship first (which includes the origin/staging sync check — see .agents/skills/ship/SKILL.md) to create one.

Two reviewers

Both post inline threads that count toward "clean", and they need re-triggering separately:

Post both after every push, as two separate comments. Triggering only Greptile is the easy mistake: the PR then shows 5/5 with cubic's threads still open from an earlier commit, and its findings never get re-checked against the fix.

@cubic-dev-ai review this PR is the documented wording — @cubic alone does not trigger it.

cubic reviews the commit that was HEAD when its run started, so a thread can describe code the next commit already changed. Before treating a cubic finding as real, check whether the current HEAD still has the problem — a stale round is a reply-and-resolve, not a fix.

Definition of "clean"

All three must hold:

1. The latest Greptile summary comment reports Confidence Score: 5/5
2. reviewThreads (GraphQL, see below) has zero threads with isResolved: false, from either bot
3. Every check has finished and passed — gh pr checks <n> shows no fail and no pending. A red run is not clean no matter what the reviewers say, and the lint/audit jobs routinely catch what a local run misses. A pending one is not clean either: it has not reported yet, and treating "not failing" as "passing" reports the PR clean before CI has had its say. Wait for it — the step-10 stop condition covers a check that never settles.

Do not stop early on "no new comments this round" alone — a thread can be open from an earlier round, and cubic often lands its first threads a round after Greptile's. Always check all three conditions freshly after every push.

Loop

1. Check current state before doing anything, including whether the PR is still mergeable:

   gh pr view <n> --json mergeable
   gh pr checks <n> | grep -v skipping
   gh pr view <n> --json comments -q '[.comments[] | select(.author.login=="greptile-apps")] | last | .body'
   gh api graphql -f query='
   query { repository(owner: "<owner>", name: "<repo>") { pullRequest(number: <n>) {
     reviewThreads(first: 50) { pageInfo { hasNextPage endCursor } nodes { id isResolved path line
       comments(first: 5) { nodes { id databaseId author { login } body } } } } } } }'
   

   The score is a line inside the body of Greptile's latest comment (| last | .body), which it edits in place across rounds. reviewThreads(first: 50) is a single page — check pageInfo.hasNextPage. If true, don't stop yet: re-run the same query with after: "<endCursor>" and keep paging until hasNextPage is false before evaluating "clean." A PR with more than 50 threads is rare but stopping on a partial page would silently miss unresolved ones past the cutoff. The query returns both bots' threads. A ReviewThread has no author of its own — identity lives on its comments, so read the opener's at comments.nodes[0].author.login and do not add an author field at the thread level, which makes the query fail to compile. If mergeable is CONFLICTING, fix that first (step 2). If a check is failing, fix that too — treat it exactly like a review finding. If a check is still pending, do not evaluate "clean" at all: go to step 9 and wait for it. Otherwise, if Greptile is 5/5, every thread across all pages has isResolved: true, and every check has finished and passed, stop — report the outcome (see "Reporting" below) and skip the rest of this list.

2. If the PR has a merge conflict, merge origin/staging, resolve the conflicts, run the usual pre-push checks, push, and go to step 8 to re-trigger review.

3. If no review has run yet (fresh PR, no bot comments): both run automatically on PR open — confirm via gh pr checks <n> (look for Greptile Review and cubic · AI code reviewer) and wait for both before doing anything else. They finish at different times, so a PR that looks clean because only one has reported is not clean yet.

4. If a review round has landed and it isn't clean: for every thread where isResolved: false, triage the finding on its own merits — this is the part that requires judgment, not a mechanical loop:

   • Real bug: fix it in the cleanest way available. Match the codebase's existing conventions for that kind of problem before inventing a new one (e.g. an SSRF-prone user-supplied-host fetch should use whatever validateUrlWithDNS/secureFetchWithPinnedIP pattern the rest of the codebase already uses for that exact situation — grep for a sibling integration solving the same problem first). Never patch around a finding with a workaround, a broad try/catch, or a suppression comment — fix the actual cause.
   • False positive: don't change code. Reply with the specific reason it doesn't apply (cite the type definition, the established pattern it matches, or the doc it follows) so the reviewer bot and a human skimming later both understand why it was left as-is.
   • Already fixed by an earlier finding in the same round: note that and resolve without a duplicate code change.

5. Reply to every thread individually before resolving it — never resolve silently:

   gh api repos/<owner>/<repo>/pulls/<n>/comments/<databaseId>/replies -f body="<what was done and why>"
   

   Then resolve via GraphQL (needs the thread id from step 1, not the comment id):

   gh api graphql -f query='mutation { resolveReviewThread(input: {threadId: "<threadId>"}) { thread { isResolved } } }'
   

6. Before pushing, re-run the full sync check from /ship step 2 — not just the log command, the whole check-and-recover flow (stash WIP if needed, rebase, verify the rebase didn't just cleanly replay stray commits, cherry-pick rebuild if it did or if it conflicted). A babysit loop spanning a long session is exactly the scenario where a branch can drift, and pushing review fixes on top of undetected drift is how an oversized PR happens even after the branch was fixed once. Then run the repo's pre-ship checks the same way /ship does before committing — not just lint/typecheck/boundary-validation, but also the conditional /cleanup (if this round's fix touched UI code) and /db-migrate (if it touched schema/migrations) gates from /ship steps 4 and 5. A review-fix round is still a code change and can trip either gate just as easily as the original commit did.

7. Commit and push the round's fixes as one commit — --force-with-lease whenever step 6's sync check rewrote history, which includes a plain git rebase origin/staging that completed with no conflicts, not only the cherry-pick rebuild path; both rewrite commits already published to the remote, so a plain git push can be rejected either way — then run /ship step 9's post-push verify — not just before the first push, every push in the loop:

   git fetch origin staging && git log --oneline --reverse origin/staging..HEAD
   gh pr view <n> --json commits -q '.commits[].messageHeadline'
   

   These two lists must describe the same commits. A review loop runs many pushes across many rounds; checking sync only before the push (step 6) and never after is how a bad push or a PR whose commit history quietly went stale between rounds goes unnoticed.

8. Re-trigger both reviewers, each as its own PR comment — a combined comment does not reliably trigger both:

   gh pr comment <n> --body "@greptile"
   gh pr comment <n> --body "@cubic-dev-ai review this PR"
   

   Then confirm both actually picked it up before waiting — gh pr checks <n> should show Greptile Review and cubic · AI code reviewer as pending. If one stayed pass from the previous round, its trigger did not land; re-post that one.

9. Wait for the new round, then go back to step 1. Pace the wait with ScheduleWakeup using a fallback delay of ~300s — both bots take 1–3 minutes, and CI is usually the slowest of the three — never busy-poll in a sleep loop. Pass the same /loop babysit PR <n> prompt on each wakeup so the loop resumes correctly.

10. Stop conditions: clean state reached (see above), or the same unresolved finding or merge conflict survives two consecutive rounds with no new information (surface it to the user instead of looping forever), or the user interrupts.

Reporting

When the loop ends, summarize: how many rounds it took, what was actually fixed (one line each), what was pushed back on as a false positive and why, and the final state — Greptile score, open thread count across both bots, and whether every check finished and passed.

Public-repo hygiene

Every reply, comment and commit you post here is public and permanent, and review bots quote your replies back, so a leak propagates. /ship's "What to Omit" (the category list and the pre-publish grep) applies to every post in this loop. Triaging a finding often means pasting evidence gathered from prod — that is exactly the moment it gets violated. Run the grep on the reply before posting, not after: editing a comment does not unsend its notification email.

Hard rules

• Never paste prod evidence into a reply without scrubbing it first (see above).
• Never resolve a thread without replying to it first.
• Never fix a finding with a hacky workaround — if the clean fix isn't obvious, find the sibling pattern elsewhere in the codebase solving the same class of problem and match it.
• Never silently drop a finding — every thread gets either a code fix or a reasoned reply.
• Never re-trigger only one reviewer. Both get a comment after every push, and both get confirmed pending before you start waiting.
• Always re-run the /ship-style sync check before every push in the loop, not just the first.