pr-contribution

The rules decide before the code does. Across 280 runs per agent on repositories whose policies were known, frontier agents opened the policy file in 3.5% of unaided runs, and in repositories that ban AI contributions outright they refused 0% of the time — under every steering condition tested, including one that quoted the ban verbatim. The failure is not judgment. It is that nobody looked. Reading the rules is the first act of this skill because measurement says it is the act that does not happen on its own.

Most agent PRs die of neglect, not of wrongness. Of 600 sampled rejections of agent-authored PRs, 562 could be categorized, and reviewer abandonment took 228 of them — closed with no meaningful human interaction. Duplicates took 142 and CI or test failures 99. Incorrect implementation accounted for 19, incomplete implementation for 15. Writing correct code is the part that was already going to work.

So the standard is the one curl states: "a contribution should be worth more to the project than the time it takes to review it." Every rule below serves that arithmetic — the reviewer's time is the scarce resource, and the change has to repay it.

Read the rules first

Nothing below is decidable until the project's own rules are in hand, and they are not in one place. Check all of them before writing code, because a rule found after the work is done has already cost the work: