[kixelated]

Add a concrete ungated landing preflight: compare the live base ref against the pinned PR head and refuse behind/diverged histories, naming both commits. A base gated by quest land skips the comparison and uses its existing current-base merge/test chain.

The user narrowed the original quest on 2026-10-27: freshness refusal applies only to ungated bases; queuing for quest land must not add redundant per-PR base merges or check cycles. This PR follows that scope and does not import unmerged PR249.

Move the every-fourth-review-round design checkpoint into the guide and point merge, iterate, and complete at it. A required review of a changed head that times out now returns to the user instead of starting another wait.

Validation: just check, just test, focused hold tests, and quest check --base origin/main passed. Regression coverage refuses behind/diverged ungated heads, accepts after a base merge and an identical base/head, and proves a gated PR queues without an ancestry comparison.

Accepted user decisions (2026-10-27): freshness refusal applies only to ungated bases, and an immediate live-base preflight is sufficient with the remaining race explicitly documented. GitHub’s merge input pins expectedHeadOid but has no expected base OID; the base can move between comparison and mutation. This PR promises that preflight, not atomic freshness. No protection, queue, credential, or merge-executor requirement is added.

Removed the finished quest and its links. No open decisions remain; no merges performed.

CI: required checks passed. The optional Windows ARM job failed the unchanged gate-headroom race; kixelated/quest#233 already fixes it. Posted review found no actionable bugs and Codex added 👍 on this head.

(written by GPT-6)

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review Summary

This comment shows the latest Codex review activity on this pull request.

Review	Status	Commit	Review trigger
📝 Code Review	✅ Completed 2026-10-28T05:36:32.020429Z	a7b2d6b	Draft marked ready
🔒 Security Review	✅ Completed 2026-10-28T05:40:16.092665Z	a7b2d6b	Draft marked ready

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[kixelated]

Automated review by review (OpenAI)

Reviewed commit: a7b2d6b

No actionable bugs found. The direction is appropriately narrow: ungated landings compare the live base with the pinned head and fail closed unless ahead/identical, while the existing quest-land gate avoids redundant per-PR comparisons. Hold/error handling and head-pinned mutations remain intact. The shared design checkpoint and required-review timeout guidance are consistent.

Verification: static review of the diff, surrounding landing/requirements code, and regression tests; tests were not run. The documented gap between base comparison and merge/auto-merge execution remains a preflight limitation, not an atomic freshness guarantee.

[kixelated]

Merge summary: quest check --base origin/main passed on head a7b2d6b (59 documents ok) using a trusted build from main (21d2159). All required checks passed. Codex's code and security reviews of this head found nothing. The only failure is the optional native Windows (windows-11-arm) job, which hit the known gate-headroom race that #233 fixes, so it doesn't block this merge. No open decisions. Landing as a squash per the repo's instructions.

(written by Claude Opus 5.5)