Develop Next — Roadmap Loop Orchestrator

Closes the three manual gaps in the roadmap workflow: item selection, the pipeline's Upfront Setup prompt, and PR merging. One invocation = one roadmap item taken from "next outstanding" to "merged + ticked". Everything else (branching, review, develop, QA loop, finalise) is delegated unchanged to /develop-story / /develop-task / /develop-bug.

Policy baseline (user-ratified 2026-07-11): auto-merge everything green; auto-answer routine questions with the recommended option and log them; stop at epic boundaries, manual items, and planning gaps; hard HALTs always stop the run.

When to Use This Skill

• User says /develop-next (one item) or /loop /develop-next (continuous).
• User says "do the next roadmap item", "keep the roadmap rolling", "what's next — build it".
• --dry-run: report which item would be selected and why, then stop. Read-only — no checkout, no pull, no state file, no pipeline actions.
• --batch (planning aid, not a loop mode): node .agents/skills/develop-next/scripts/select-next.mjs --batch prints a maximal set of ready rows that can be developed concurrently in separate git worktrees — dependency-ready (same predicate as selection) and write-disjoint (no two share a touches: tag either marks !). Emits the batch, the soft overlaps accepted, rows held back by hard conflicts or by an epic-integration epic (bug.18 — a worktree cut from the base branch cannot honour an integration branch), and git worktree add … develop commands. The worktrees go inside the repository, at .worktrees/batch-<slug>; --worktree-root <dir> names another repo-relative root, and a root that leaves the repository (absolute, .., or a symlink out) is refused. Gitignore the root before creating them (/.worktrees/ in .gitignore), or the next run sees them as untracked files. Requires rows to carry touches: annotations (see references/roadmap-selection.md §Parallel batch). Advisory — runs nothing; the operator fans out worktrees and merges to develop serially.

Configuration

Read once per run from the consumer project's skills-config.yaml (developNext: block); every key has a default: