Httpx REST Of The Owl

Task

$ARGUMENTS

If $ARGUMENTS is empty, use the task definition the user pasted into the conversation (a ticket, a design note, a one-line ask). If there is none, stop and ask for one — this skill needs a target.

The bit

How to draw an owl: (1) draw two circles. (2) draw the rest of the owl. The user just handed you the two circles — a task definition. This skill draws the rest of the owl: the whole lifecycle from "here's what I want" to "here's a green, reviewed PR waiting for your merge." It is a genuine end-to-end run, not a gag — but it earns the name by doing the enormous unglamorous middle the meme skips over.

It does everything except merge. The merge button stays with the human. Never merge, never force-push over someone else's work, never mark the PR ready-to-merge on the user's behalf.

How this skill works

You orchestrate the repo's other skills as a pipeline. Each phase below names the sibling skill whose playbook you follow — open that skill's SKILL.md and run its steps, then come back here for the next phase. Track the whole run with TodoWrite: one todo per phase, in_progress when you start it, completed when it's done. The flow is long and mostly unattended; the todo list is how the user follows along.

Stop and hand back to the user (do not barrel ahead) if any phase hits something a human must decide: a missing secret or env var, an ambiguous requirement the task definition doesn't settle, a destructive migration, or a test failure that looks like a real bug in existing code rather than in your change.

Phase 1 — Plan

Follow httpx-plan (or httpx-implement's lighter planning phase for a small, single-surface task). Produce a concrete build sequence. If the task definition leaves a real ambiguity, ask now — a wrong assumption here costs the whole owl.

Phase 2 — Implement

Follow httpx-implement. Work the plan in small batches, keeping the suite green as you go. For a bug fix, write the failing test first. Do not scope-creep beyond the task definition.

Phase 3 — Local review and fix

Follow httpx-review against the working diff (git diff master...HEAD). Fix every finding you agree with; for ones you don't, note why. Re-run the suite. Then follow httpx-self-review as a last pass so the diff doesn't read as AI-written. Do not open the PR until this phase is clean.

Phase 4 — QA the change

Follow httpx-qa. It classifies the diff and runs only the QA that fits: screenshots for a UI change, the exercised endpoint plus e2e for a backend change, command output for a CLI, tests for a library — and nothing at all for a docs/config-only change. Don't hand-pick the QA yourself; let the skill right-size it to what the diff touches. It saves artifacts to a Downloads/<repo>-<branch> folder where the user can open them — Phase 5 folds them into the PR so the reviewer sees the change actually working.

QA is a gate, not a formality — clear it before you touch the PR. The whole point of running QA here is to catch problems before they become CI failures or reviewer comments. If QA surfaces anything wrong — a screenshot that shows the change is broken or ugly, an endpoint returning the wrong response, a CLI erroring, a failing test — stop and fix it: loop back to Phase 2/3, correct the change, and re-QA. Do NOT open the PR (Phase 5) on a change that QA has shown to be broken and then rely on CI or the reviewer to catch it. Only advance once QA is genuinely clean (or the only gaps are ones you've explicitly flagged as un-QA-able and told the user about).

Phase 5 — Open the PR (humanized)

1. Commit the work on a topic branch (never commit straight to master) and push.
2. Draft the PR body from the task definition + what you actually built, using httpx-pr's Summary / Changes / Test Plan structure. Fold in the Phase 4 QA summary — for a UI change, reference the screenshots (note that gh pr create can't upload images, so point at the Downloads/<repo>-<branch> folder and prompt the user to drag them in, unless the repo has an image-hosting convention); for backend/CLI, paste the captured output.
3. Run the body through httpx-humanize before it goes out — the description is the most-read prose in the whole change; it must not read like a chatbot wrote it.
4. Open the PR with gh pr create (base master). Capture the PR number/URL and report it.

Phase 6 — Re-review the PR and fix

Now that the diff is a real PR, review it once more with httpx-review (a PR at rest reads differently than an uncommitted diff — integration seams and the change as a whole surface here). Fix findings, commit, push.

Phase 7 — Poll CI and fix failures

Watch the checks until they reach a terminal state:

gh pr checks <number> --watch

For each failing check, pull its logs (gh run view <run-id> --log-failed), diagnose the real cause, fix it, commit, push, and re-watch. A flaky check gets one re-run before you treat it as a genuine failure — don't loop forever re-running a green-on-retry check, and don't paper over a real failure by disabling the test. If a failure is in code your change didn't touch and can't have caused, stop and tell the user rather than guessing.

Phase 8 — Poll for code review and resolve

Once CI is green, wait for review to land (human or bot). Poll on a sane cadence — check, wait, check — rather than hammering the API:

gh pr view <number> --json reviews,reviewDecision,comments
gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/<number>/comments   # inline review threads

For the feedback that arrives, follow httpx-address-review: triage each comment, apply the changes it warrants, draft a reply, and resolve the thread once handled. Push fixes, which re-triggers CI — loop back to Phase 7 if anything goes red.

Bounded wait. Reviews depend on a human showing up, so do not poll indefinitely. If no new review activity arrives after a reasonable window (say, several polls over ~15 minutes, or immediately if the user tells you to wrap up), stop polling and hand back with a summary. Resume later when the user says review has landed.

Phase 9 — Land the owl (but don't merge)

When CI is green and all review threads are resolved, stop. Report: the PR link, its check status, which review comments you addressed and how, and the one thing left — the user's merge. Mark all TodoWrite tasks complete.

State plainly if you stopped early and why (waiting on review, blocked on a decision, a failure you wouldn't paper over).

Rules

• Never merge, never mark ready-to-merge, never force-push over other commits. The human owns the merge.
• No scope creep across the whole owl. The task definition is the contract. Fixing a review comment is in scope; rewriting an unrelated subsystem because you noticed it is not.
• Don't fake green. Never disable, skip, or xfail a test, loosen a lint rule, or --no-verify past a guard to make CI pass. A red check is information; fix the cause.
• Humanize anything the user will read — PR body, review replies, commit messages. Run httpx-humanize on prose before it ships.
• Stop for humans on human decisions — missing secrets, ambiguous requirements, destructive changes, or a failure that points at a pre-existing bug.

When NOT to use

• The user wants just one phase — planning, or a review, or a PR description. Use that skill directly; the full owl is overkill.
• The task isn't defined well enough to build unattended. Nail the definition down first (or use httpx-plan, which forces the clarifying questions), then come back.
• The change must be merged, released, or deployed as part of the ask — this skill deliberately stops at the merge button. Do that step yourself, with a human in the loop.