Replies, publication, and history

Review text is human-visible output, so the workflow separates drafting from posting. This page collects the reply style, router behavior, and safety gates that apply before comments, resolves, deletes, or history-sensitive changes reach GitHub.

Mental model

Concern	Rule
Reply style	draft direct, anchored review feedback without noisy quoting
Router behavior	choose exactly one review mode before loading shared rules
Publication	draft and supervise anything a human will see
Bot carve-out	auto-reply/auto-resolve only verified bot-authored threads inside an explicitly-invoked flow
Deletion/history	verify removals and trace rationale for long-lived or legacy infra

Using it

Reply style

When drafting PR thread replies:

• Do not use RE:.
• Default: reply directly; do not quote when the whole parent comment is the reference.
• If you need to point at a specific fragment, use a minimal blockquote (> ...) and then reply.
• A closing prompt like Wdyt is optional, not mandatory. Use it only when it fits the tone of the specific comment.
• Default to inline anchored comments for code-review feedback, not PR-level summary bodies, unless explicitly requested.
• Any code/file/symbol reference in a comment body must be a clickable source link to the exact location on the PR head SHA.
• UI-related comments, replies, or PR-level feedback drafted after /k-agent-review or live-ui-review need screenshot handoff evidence kept outside the body, or a valid blocker/non-applicability reason.
• Local screenshot paths never go into GitHub bodies. After explicit approval, k-github may upload them through an editor in the destination repository and embed the resulting user-attachments URLs; the upload preserves any existing draft text and inherits that repository's visibility. Before upload, each file is viewed, md5s are checked for unintended duplicates, and image dimensions are checked for sane legibility.

Router behavior

The review router selects exactly one of four modes:

Mode	Meaning
local changes	review the local diff / branch-delta
PR review	review an initial or continued PR
PR fix	address feedback
plan review	judge a design/plan document against codebase reality

Shared rules and PR-common setup are loaded once by the router, not duplicated per mode.

When both a dirty working tree and a current-branch PR exist, the router asks which target to review instead of silently forcing local review first.

GitHub posting stays outside read-only review mode until the user explicitly asks for a side effect.

Reference: publication, deletion, and history gates

Gate	Source	Rule
Human-Visible Publication Gate	SOP 3.6 in the single source home/readonly_AGENTS.md; ~/CLAUDE.md and ~/.gemini/GEMINI.md are symlinks to it; referenced by k-github, k-review/references/shared_rules.md, k-review/references/pr_fix.md	anything a human will see — PR/issue replies, review submissions, resolving a human thread — is always drafted and supervised before sending
Bot-authored thread carve-out	same gate	verified bot-authored threads may be auto-replied/auto-resolved inside an explicitly-invoked flow
Pending review merge guard	GitHub side-effect layer	reads any current-account PENDING review and refuses to create/submit fragmented feedback unless the review draft includes a reconciliation ledger
PR-fix Drain Mode	k-review/references/pr_fix.md	when the user explicitly asks to batch (repeat the process, you know the drill, address all), drains threads back-to-back instead of re-asking after every single thread
Deletion-Safety Audit	k-review/references/judging_core.md	any removal of files/exports/symbols/behavior must verify no live references, public-surface cleanup, behavior parity in the replacement, test migration, base comparison, and PR-body disclosure
Historical-Rationale Gate	k-review/references/judging_core.md + k-compose-pr	removing/replacing long-lived or legacy infra requires tracing the origin (git log --follow, blame, linked PR/issue) and, when correcting historical drift, stating the original reason in the PR ## Root Cause
Elastic/Kibana readiness audit CLI	,kbn-pr-audit	read-only Elastic/Kibana tool-pack check that surfaces PR-body/label/thread drift before a reply/resolve/push cycle; it never mutates GitHub

Verified bot-authored means user.type == "Bot", a [bot] login, or a known-bot allowlist from the active domain overlay. Ambiguous or mixed human+bot threads fail safe to human.

In PR-fix Drain Mode, bot threads can be auto-finished and human-thread drafts are queued for approval.

See Custom commands for the ,kbn-pr-audit command.