krites

κριτής — "judge / critic." The reviewer/merger that closes the kleroterion loop.

Krites is an autonomous CLI that reviews the pull requests Praktor opens — checking each PR against the acceptance criteria of the Boule Task it implements, plus code quality, tests, and security — posts a GitHub review, and (when satisfied) enables gated auto-merge. It is built on @kleroterion/koine and is the third stage of the pipeline:

Boule (grooms backlog: Designs → Requirements → Tasks)
  → Praktor (implements a ready Task, opens a PR)
    → Krites (reviews the PR, approves, enables gated auto-merge)   ← you are here

Safety model

Krites can influence merges to the default branch, so it is deliberately conservative:

• Branch protection is the real gate. Krites is granted no Administration scope and never force-merges. It posts an approving review and merges via the REST API pinned to the reviewed SHA; with no bypass, GitHub branch protection still enforces required checks/reviews server-side and rejects the merge if they are unmet (a 405/409 is handled as "not yet", never a crash). Both doctor and the deterministic canMerge gate refuse to proceed if branch protection is absent.
• The LLM is advisory only. The reviewer is read-only and returns a strict, fenced verdict. A deterministic, default-deny canMerge predicate — not the model's prose — is the sole authority on whether auto-merge is enabled. All PR content (diff, title, body, comments) is treated as untrusted data, never as instructions.
• Trusted-author only. Auto-merge is enabled only for PRs authored by the trusted Praktor bot identity (verified by login, not a user-settable label) that link a boule:managed kind:task.
• Bounded blast radius. A per-run merge cap (KRITES_MAX_MERGES, default 1), single-concurrency workflow, SHA-pinned review (a force-push under the claim invalidates it), live boule:halt re-poll before enabling merge, and --dry-run for safe planning.
• Own, least-privilege identity. Krites uses its own GitHub App with no Administration scope, so it cannot edit its own branch protection or CI workflows.

Commands

krites doctor     # preflight: config, credentials, repo + Discussion categories, merge-capability,
                  # and branch-protection probe (fails if protection is absent)
krites next       # list reviewable PRs (trusted-author, linked Task, not draft/merged/reviewed)
krites status     # pipeline snapshot: candidate / approved / changes-requested PRs + active claims
krites review     # claim → review → post review → gated auto-merge-enable for one PR

Global flags: --repo, --project, --budget, --max-turns, --dry-run, --json, --verbose.

Configuration

See .env.example. Krites resolves its GitHub identity from the KRITES_APP_* trio (preferred) or a KRITES_GITHUB_TOKEN / GITHUB_TOKEN PAT fallback. Behaviour knobs (KRITES_MERGE_METHOD, KRITES_REQUIRE_CI, KRITES_MAX_MERGES, KRITES_TRUSTED_AUTHOR) are validated by a zod schema with safe defaults.

License

MIT © Bill Schumacher