GitHub Branch Policy

Overview

Run a repeatable audit for GitHub branch policy safety and Actions workflow hygiene. Validate ruleset enforcement, required checks, workflow registration integrity, and branch cleanup behavior that commonly break CI and auto-merge.

This skill explicitly checks for real-world failure modes where:

• auto-merge is enabled and checks are green, but PRs remain BEHIND/BLOCKED, and
• auto-merge enablement fails transiently (for example GitHub API 502), leaving PRs stranded.

Use This Skill When

Apply this skill for requests like:

• "Audit branch protection/rulesets on this repo."
• "Check whether auto-merge and branch cleanup are configured correctly."
• "Find ghost workflows or stale branches causing Actions failures."
• "Why are we getting Cannot update this protected ref?"
• "Why is auto-merge enabled but nothing merges?"
• "Make sure branch policy matches solo-developer expectations."