/cchores – Autonomous Backlog Grooming

Pick exactly one suitable open issue from the backlog, fix it with a /cdebug TDD cycle, and open a single PR — fully autonomously, inside a hardened envelope. One issue per run. Fail-closed on every ambiguity.

When to Use

  • You have a backlog of small, well-defined bug issues and want an agent to groom them one at a time without supervision.
  • Running on a clean feature-branch checkout (never the default branch, never a dirty worktree).
  • Not for: Large features (use /cspec → /ctdd), issues that aren’t reproducible/diagnosable defects, or anything requiring human judgment on scope. Such issues are classified unsuitable and skipped.

How It Fits in the Workflow

/cchores is an autonomous orchestrator that sits alongside the pipeline, not inside it. It composes /cdebug (Task-dispatched, fresh context per step) to do the actual root-cause-and-fix work, then handles selection, idempotency, redaction, the regression oracle, and PR creation around it.

graph LR
    A["/cchores"] --> B["select 1 issue<br/>(classifier)"]
    B --> C["/cdebug<br/>(autonomous TDD fix)"]
    C --> D["regression oracle"]
    D --> E["redact + gh pr create"]

    style A fill:#74c0fc,color:#000
    style C fill:#74c0fc,color:#000

What It Does

One issue per run

A single /cchores invocation selects, fixes, and opens a PR for exactly one issue. It never batches. Selection picks the highest-severity suitable open issue (or an explicit issue-number override). Severity is judged on issue content, not labels alone (AP-028 calibration triad). Issues that are already in progress, in the cross-run re-selection store, or have an open PR referencing them (exact Closes/Fixes #N or a chore/issue-{N}-* branch) are skipped.

Suitability classification

A read-only classifier agent (agents/cchores-issue-classifier.md, tools: Read, Grep, Glob) labels each candidate suitable or unsuitable. Issue text is passed inside a nonce fence (the same neutralization used by /caudit); instruction-like content in an issue body (e.g. suitable: true, ignore prior analysis) trips a tripwire that forces unsuitable. Ambiguous classification maps to unsuitable — fail-closed. The skill consumes the classifier’s machine-parseable verdict via jq -e; an unparsable verdict aborts.

Fail-closed behavior

/cchores aborts cleanly rather than guessing whenever:

  • The worktree is dirty or the checkout is on the default branch.
  • The default branch cannot be unambiguously determined (git symbolic-ref vs gh repo view disagree).
  • commands.test or patterns.test_fail_pattern is unconfigured (caught at preflight, before burning a /cdebug cycle).
  • The redactor (scripts/redact-secrets.sh) or its pattern source is missing.
  • The classifier agent is unreachable, or its verdict can’t be parsed.
  • The post-fix diff (git diff {default}...HEAD) is empty.
  • A real regression survives the oracle, or any pre-PR gate (shellcheck, sync.sh --check, check-no-pending-sfg-lift.sh) fails.

No PR is opened on any abort trigger.

The regression oracle

After the fix is committed to the chore branch, /cchores runs the full configured suite and extracts failing test FILES from runner output using patterns.test_fail_pattern plus the configured per-file marker patterns.test_file_marker. A failing file is a real regression unless it is both (a) outside the touched set and (b) passes on re-run (retried up to N=2, 120s per-file timeout). Anything that persists, occurs in a touched file, or whose output can’t be parsed (unknown = real) blocks the PR. The pre-PR gate is a CI superset.

The patterns.test_file_marker config field (DD-007)

patterns.test_file_marker is a config field under patterns (default "") added to both templates/workflow-config.json and templates/workflow-config-full.json. It lets the regression oracle identify which file a failure belongs to so per-file flake tolerance can apply.

  • When set, the oracle extracts the per-file name from runner output and applies flake re-runs per file.
  • When empty (the default), the algorithm degrades explicitly to “any persistent suite failure blocks the PR” — no per-file flake tolerance — and says so in the run report. It does NOT silently hard-fit correctless’s >>> {file} echo format.

The change is purely additive and namespaced under patterns, so schema_version is not bumped. setup migrates existing installed configs additively (adds the key with "" if absent, never overwriting a set value). /csetup detection MAY populate it when a per-file marker is detectable, but defaults to empty.

Outbound redaction

Every outbound field — PR title and body, issue comment, commit message, and branch slug — is generated from structured fields and then passed through the coded redactor scripts/redact-secrets.sh (each pattern match replaced with <REDACTED>). It is the sole redaction entrypoint; redaction is never LLM-performed. If the redactor or its pattern source is absent, /cchores fails closed. PR body ≤ 8 KB, comment ≤ 4 KB, with overflow pointing to the local (gitignored) artifact.

The Autonomous Envelope

/cchores runs without human turns, so the safety properties are structural:

  • Shared global working-tree lock at the fixed path .correctless/artifacts/worktree.lock, acquired before any selection or git operation and released on every terminal path. This is the mutual-exclusion point against /cauto and any other working-tree-mutating orchestrator.
  • Decision journaling: each consequential autonomous decision (issue chosen + ranked candidates, suitability verdicts, flake-vs-real calls, abort reason) is appended via scripts/autonomous-decision-writer.sh (branch-scoped JSONL). /cchores verifies JSONL growth after each /cdebug invocation.
  • Run manifest at chore-run-{branch_slug}.json (gitignored, excluded from PR staging) records the selected issue, expected steps, and a terminal status (complete / aborted / noop). /cstatus consumes it.
  • Run report on every terminal state, surfaced in /cstatus.
  • Cross-run re-selection store at .correctless/meta/cchores-attempted.json prevents re-selecting the same issue across runs; it is excluded from autonomous GC.

Configuration

Field Default Purpose
commands.test (required) The full suite the regression oracle runs. Empty → preflight abort.
patterns.test_fail_pattern (required) How failing lines are recognized. Empty → preflight abort.
patterns.test_file_marker "" Per-file marker enabling flake tolerance. Empty → whole-suite blocking.
  • /cdebug — the TDD fix engine /cchores Task-dispatches.
  • /cauto — the other autonomous orchestrator that shares the global worktree lock.
  • /cstatus — surfaces the chore-run manifest and retained branches.