/ship-loop — Bot-paired fast lane PR cycle

Lane choice: use this skill for coherent-arc internal PRs — one closable bead, or one small-epic slice (≤5 child beads of the same surface), with paired tests. The PR is the atomic-revert unit: bundle scenarios that ship-or-revert together; split scenarios with independent rollback. For fork-based OSS contributions, use the /pr-* family (pr-research, plan, pr-implement, etc.; tier contribute). For large epics (15+ child beads) or multi-wave work, use /crank. See CLAUDE.md ## Workflow for the canonical unit-of-PR rule.

Capture of the discipline that landed 8/9 internal PRs in the 2026-05-18 session at 19.5-min median time-to-merge. Five named failure modes (F1–F5); four closed mechanically. The full rationale lives in docs/learnings/2026-05-18-xp-bdd-tdd-workflow-synthesis.md.

Overview / When to Use

Run this skill at the START of each PR you intend to ship to your own main branch. The skill enforces the cycle as a sequence; each step has a clear done-state and gate.

Pair partner: claude-review (GitHub App workflow at .github/workflows/claude.yml) auto-fires on pull_request: opened/synchronize. No @claude mention is required. Operator does the edits; bot does the review check.

The 9-step cycle