Ops Release Loop

ops-release-loop

The release loop: issue-triggered and CI-gated, with no mid-flow human approval. Two deliberate signals are the go-ahead — a maintainer opened an issue naming the version and applied the ops/auto-release label, and CI on the release PR is green. No approval pause, by design, for fast beta cycles.

Publishing is irreversible. Once the gates pass this ships with no further human look, and a published version cannot be cleanly un-published. Use it only where CI-green plus the pre-publish review is a sufficient gate. The deliberate label is the one human decision.

Orchestrate and gate; the repo does the release

Every release mechanic belongs to ops-release, which is always repo-provided. Version files, changelog format, the publish target, tagging, the back-merge: all product facts. This loop owns the sequence and the two gates, and nothing else.

There is no framework default for ops-release. A repo without one cannot release, and that is correct: the engine has no business guessing how a product ships.

What it calls

It never calls ops-branching. Release branches and bases are ops-release's business, and ops-release reaches ops-branching itself if it needs to. Reporting on the trigger issue goes through github-ops, against the issues repo from topology.

The /goal

/goal Release <version> of <repo>: cut, CI-green, pre-publish review passed with no BLOCK, published with its tag and release notes, the line synced, and the triggering issue commented and closed. Not met until sync has run.

The sync is in the goal because it is the step manual releases most often forget.

Step 0 — the trigger

• Fired by loop-dispatch on issues.labeled + the release label (labels.release from ops-repo-meta · identity), or run manually as "release <version>".
• Version = the triggering issue's title, e.g. release 18.0.0-beta.3 → 18.0.0-beta.3. If the title has no clear release <version>, comment on the issue asking for one and stop. Never guess a version.
• Notify (ops-notify · send, key release-start-<repo>-<version>): releasing <version> from issue #n.

Step 1 — plan, then cut

1. ops-release · plan with { trigger: { issue_number, version_text } }. It returns the line, the version and the units of work. It opens nothing.
2. ops-release · cut with that plan. It returns the release PR.

cut is idempotent: re-running returns the existing release PR rather than opening a second. So a re-fired routine is safe, and this loop must not add a "did I already cut?" check — that belongs in the action.

Step 2 — drive CI green

ops-ci · status on the release PR until it settles.

• Green → Step 3.
• Red → read the failing log (ops-ci · log) and hand the fix to ops-change · implement, then ops-change · verify, on the release branch. Re-check CI. Cap: 8 attempts. A release branch that will not go green is a stop, not a retry forever.
• Still pending at the cap → stop, comment on the issue, leave the PR open.

Never publish on red. Never treat a mergeable state as evidence of green — with no branch protection, the forge will allow it.

If CI cannot be made green: stop, comment the blocker on the triggering issue, leave the release PR open, and leave the label on so a human can decide.

Step 3 — the pre-publish review (second gate)

Once CI is green, and before anything irreversible, run the release-reviewer agent (defined in this plugin — read-only Opus; what it checks lives in its own definition). Gather the PR's facts through github-ops — number, head, base, target version, triggering issue, the diff, CI status, mergeability — and pass them in.

It scores the PR against the repo's release-review checklist when the repo ships one, otherwise the engine's default (references/release-review-checklist.md). The checklist is an extension point, not a fixed list. It returns VERDICT: PASS or VERDICT: BLOCK + findings, and this loop gates on the verdict — the agent is read-only and cannot publish.

The routine's allowed_tools must include the Agent/Task tool. If the agent cannot be spawned, the gate has not run — treat that as a BLOCK and follow the BLOCK path below. Do not fall back to reviewing inline on the loop's own model.

An earlier version of this step did exactly that, and it was wrong twice over. A gate the release driver performs on itself is not a second gate; it is the same judgement that decided to release, asked again. And "reviewed inline" reads in a comment as reviewed, so the release ships with a gate everyone believes held.

This is not hypothetical. The umbraco-mcp-ops prototype shipped PRs reporting a passed review that had never run: its review skills carried disable-model-invocation: true, so a headless subagent received them as inert text rather than executing them, and nothing noticed (their PR #39). A gate that cannot run must say so and stop. It must never report a pass.

On any BLOCK: do not publish. Then, in order:

1. Open an issue titled Release <version> blocked by pre-publish review, detailing every BLOCK finding (which check, what is wrong, why) and linking the release PR and the trigger issue. Label it with labels.release_blocked from ops-repo-meta · identity, by purpose and never the literal name, if that label exists on the repo.
2. Notify (ops-notify · send, urgency: high, key release-blocked-<repo>-<version>) — a human is now blocking a release.
3. Comment on the trigger issue pointing at the blocked issue and the PR, and remove the release label so the loop does not re-fire until a human fixes the cause and re-labels.

WARN findings → proceed, and include them in the completion comment.

Step 4 — publish, then sync

1. ops-release · publish with the plan and the merge commit. It tags, pushes the artifacts and publishes the notes, marking a prerelease where the version says so.
2. ops-release · sync for that line. The /goal is not met until this has run — see references/sync-contract.md for what it owes.
3. Comment the outcome on the trigger issue (release link, tag, "line synced") and close it, on the issues repo from topology.
4. Notify (key release-done-<repo>-<version>): released <version>, line synced.

Guardrails

• Two gates before publish: CI-green AND the pre-publish review. Never publish on red, never with an open BLOCK. These are the loop's own gates and delegation never bypasses them — ops-release doing the mechanics does not make it responsible for the gate.
• A BLOCK is always surfaced, never silent — an issue and a notification, then de-label.
• Never skip sync (except where the model has no separate release base, which sync itself reports as a no-op). An un-synced line is the classic release mistake.
• Never force-push.
• One release per triggering issue, version from that issue's title only.
• Never resolve a branch, a base or a merge strategy, and never call ops-branching.
• 8 attempts to get a release branch green, then stop and report.
• If the version is ambiguous, stop and ask on the issue rather than shipping something unverified.
• Never use fable.

Running as a routine

loop-dispatch routes issues.labeled + ops/auto-release here, so labelling a release <version> issue fires it. The version comes from the issue, so nothing else needs configuring per run. The environment needs this skill, github-ops, ops-capabilities, and the repo's own ops-release. (The label must exist on the target repo.)