Quest Plan

Release Gauntlet · 4 levels · populated

Level 1 · Verify the suite

Run the full test suite and don’t move on until you understand every failure, skip, and flake. Run everything, not just what changed. Check coverage on the files that changed this cycle and flag anything load-bearing that isn’t covered. Reproduce CI locally if the runner and your machine can disagree. A skipped or flaky test is a blocker to report, not a result to ignore — either fix it, or write down exactly why it’s being shipped skipped. When the suite’s state is understood and everything green is actually green, run quest_level complete.

Level 2 · Harden

Look for what shipping this would actually risk, not what the diff says it does. Check for security and performance regressions: a permission or auth check that got loosened, an unbounded loop or query introduced this cycle, a new dependency with a known CVE, secrets that became reachable in logs or error output. Diff against the last release, not just the last commit — regressions creep in one small change at a time. Note anything you can’t fix now as a named risk rather than shipping it silently. When you’ve hardened what you can and named what you can’t, run quest_level complete.

Level 3 · Reconcile docs

Make sure what’s written down still matches what the code does. Check the README, CHANGELOG, and any user-facing docs against the actual current behavior — a flag that used to do one thing and now does another, a config option that no longer exists, a migration step nobody wrote down. Confirm the version bump is correct and any breaking change has a migration note. Docs that describe last release’s behavior are a bug users will hit before you do. When the docs and the code agree, run quest_level complete.

Level 4 · Ship

Tag it, and mean it. Confirm the build artifacts are reproducible from a clean checkout, the changelog going out to users is accurate and reads like something a human wrote, and nothing from levels 1-3 was left as a silent “we’ll fix it after.” Do the honest gut check: would you want this running in production tonight, on call, with no one else awake? If yes, tag the release and run quest_level complete. If no, quest_level complete —blocked “<what’s stopping you>” so the gauntlet doesn’t quietly end in a ship that shouldn’t have happened.