Distillation

🔴 (12:48) Publish terminal reporting must parse PUBLISH_ARGS inside main() rather than at module load; missing inputs should produce a warning and fallback so reporting is not suppressed.
🔴 (12:48) Publish terminal reporting must use one always() reporter that derives exactly one status from the Craft outcome, rather than separate potentially overlapping always() steps for cancelled, failure, and success.
🔴 (12:48) For missing publish inputs, update-issue.js uses undefined to skip target restoration, while post-result.js uses {} so reporting continues.
🔴 (12:48) The CI poller’s required transition after CI succeeds is: remove any stale ci-ready label, revalidate the exact approved release snapshot, and always add ci-ready again so a fresh label event triggers publishing; the add must never be optimized away as idempotent.
🔴 (12:48) If a release issue is renamed, its release details change, or it is re-approved through a different accepted event, processing must be revoked or stopped for that issue and it must never reach ci-ready.
🔴 (12:48) Focused CI-poller regressions must prove stale ci-ready removal, final release-snapshot revalidation, and per-issue termination, including mutation checks demonstrating that tests fail if any of those protections are removed.
🔴 (12:48) Always enable workflow_dispatch where operators need manual recovery.
🔴 (12:48) Privileged manual recovery should use a no-secret relay protected by a main-only environment and a successful default-branch workflow_run handoff, rather than direct secret-bearing dispatch, because a dispatcher selects workflow YAML before jobs, guards, or checkout execute.
🔴 (12:48) Workflows must be identified by their checked-in filenames, such as ci-poller.yml, rather than placeholders or numeric IDs.
🔴 (12:48) Always bind release authorization and attestations to the exact live request, a trusted actor, and current label-event provenance.
🔴 (12:48) Automated approval requires request-bound proof from github-actions[bot] before sentry-internal-app[bot] adds accepted; generic app identity is insufficient.
🔴 (12:48) A release must never reach ci-ready if its request changes or its accepted event is replaced.
🔴 (12:48) The captured approval event and request digest must be validated before CI, after CI, while recording CI-ready proof, immediately before adding ci-ready, and immediately before Craft; repeated live fencing was chosen over one-time initial validation because issue state can change during CI or setup.
🔴 (12:48) Always enforce trusted, state-bound release workflow transitions: before applying accepted, moving an issue to ci-ready, or publishing, validate the live canonical issue, current label events, actor provenance, and matching attestations.
🔴 (12:48) Release transitions must reject renamed, closed, changed, re-approved, self-approved, or unverifiable requests.
🔴 (12:48) The CI poller is solely responsible for adding ci-ready.
🔴 (12:48) Recovery must retain workflow_dispatch, but dispatched-ref code must never execute arbitrarily or receive repository secrets; workflows must check out a trusted ref and use protected environments.
🔴 (12:48) Release workflows must use least-privilege permissions, avoid exposing RBAC data, and pin actions and publishing images to immutable revisions or digests.
🔴 (12:48) Regression tests must verify workflow ordering and final revalidation immediately before credential-bearing publication.
🔴 (12:48) Always fail closed with trusted, snapshot-bound release checks: treat the exact triggering issue snapshot as immutable security input for approval, CI-poller, and publication workflows.
🔴 (12:48) Attestations and validation must bind to the raw issue title, body, labels, and dry-run state, rejecting requests whenever live state no longer matches the captured snapshot.
🔴 (12:48) Snapshot binding applies to human approval, automated approval, CI-ready proof creation, and final publication.
🔴 (12:48) Trusted default-branch code must run before credentials are created; untrusted issue text must not be interpolated into shell commands; snapshot verification is mandatory at every entry point.
🔴 (12:48) Concurrency handling must account for the CI poller always re-adding ci-ready after checking CI, even if the label is already present, while another workflow may remove it.
🔴 (12:48) Security changes must begin with fail-first regression tests covering mutation, stale-event, provenance, and workflow-ordering bypasses, followed by targeted and full validation.
🔴 (12:48) Sensitive workflow and release-automation changes always require a fresh, independent, read-only security review of the exact current worktree before merge or handoff.
🔴 (12:48) Independent reviewers must inspect current source lines and relevant tests across approval, provenance, CI handoff, revocation, credentials, pinning, and untrusted-context paths, and must not edit files during review.
🔴 (12:48) Security review findings must be substantive, ordered by severity, use the exact labels MUST-FIX, CONCERN, and PASS, include file:line citations and a compact test/evidence section, and end with an unambiguous MERGE or DO-NOT-MERGE verdict.
🔴 (12:48) If the required security inspection cannot be performed, the reviewer must explicitly report BLOCKED and return DO-NOT-MERGE.
🔴 (12:48) GitHub Actions release, approval, and CI-poller changes must preserve defense in depth and fail closed: run only trusted default-branch code before token access, keep secret-bearing jobs behind the protected production environment, prevent dispatched refs from receiving secrets, and pin actions and containers to immutable digests.
🔴 (12:48) Approvals must be bound to immutable request details and current label-event IDs; self-approval is prohibited; attestations must be revalidated immediately before every privileged state transition or publish operation.
🔴 (12:48) If a release request or approval changes, workflows must remove approval-related labels and stop rather than continue.
🔴 (12:48) Focused automated tests for release workflows must enforce workflow ordering, token identity, action pinning, dispatch restrictions, exact body preservation, cleanup, and race-condition handling.

Distillation

Observations