GitHub as an active part of the harness: the full feature catalogue

Using a few GitHub features by habit leaves useful ones unused and lets others be adopted without thought. So every GitHub feature is looked at on purpose: adopted with a concrete use, or rejected with a stated reason, and GitHub becomes a working part of the harness rather than a place code is stored.

The user, 2026-10-21: “actually, push github at 300%”, then “actually, push github at 500%”.

• Go through the full GitHub feature catalogue: adopt each feature with a concrete use or reject it with a reason. Reliable features only (UR-17).
• GitHub becomes an active part of the harness: the merge queue as the door, live check runs, a projection of the tracker, self-updating pull requests, attested reviews, release trains and a live dashboard.
• (500%) Four parallel deep-research tracks (security and supply chain; public progress automation; CI, merge queue and reuse; topology, docs, development containers, packages and APIs) feed one architect, who keeps one coherent design.

What is live (checked 2026-10-21, not asserted)

• The merge queue is the door to main. The repository ruleset trunk (id 25593191) is active on the default branch with a merge_queue rule (merge method MERGE, grouping ALLGREEN, up to 4 entries merged per group). The same ruleset requires a pull request (review threads resolved), refuses deletion and non-fast-forward pushes, and requires five checks: Typecheck, public tests, build, Secret and privacy scan, Relative Markdown links, Analyze JavaScript and TypeScript (javascript-typescript) and Full suite shards / Merge one qualification receipt. Check it yourself: gh api repos/LLM-4-People/bridlewise-testing/rulesets/25593191.
• The checks run in the queue. ci.yml, codeql.yml, secret-scan.yml and docs-links.yml run on merge_group (pull request #43, merged as 805c43ea). test-shards.yml runs as the shards job of ci.yml.
• Release tags are protected by the ruleset protect-release-tags (id 25439901, active).

What is missing

• The feature catalogue (every GitHub feature adopted with a use or rejected with a reason) is written in the design but not published here.
• No live check runs of the harness’s own, no projection of the tracker, no release train and no live dashboard yet (P3–P5).
• The workflows are still hand-written; the generated pipeline (P3.1) replaces them.