autopilot

Requested: $ARGUMENTS (default status)

The state lives in .claude/autopilot.json, committed so cloud sessions read it from the clone and every flip is auditable. next-ticket refuses to work while enabled is false.

status

Report, in this order: whether autopilot is on, how many tickets are in progress against maxInFlight, how many are ready, how many are blocked and on what, and whether any sit at needs-attention — those need a human and will never clear on their own. Derive all of it from docs/tickets/ plus branches, the way /board does.

on

Preflight — all four, no exceptions

Autopilot without a real merge gate is not automation, it is merging whatever was written. Check every item and refuse if any fails, naming the failure and the fix:

1. A CI workflow exists — something under .github/workflows/.
2. Branch protection requires status checks. Read it: gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/branches/{default}/protection required_status_checks.contexts must be non-empty. If protection is absent or the list is empty, gh pr merge --auto merges on the spot and autopilot means nothing. This is the check that matters most — do not wave it through because a workflow file exists.
3. Auto-merge is enabled on the repository — gh api repos/{owner}/{repo} -q .allow_auto_merge must be true. (gh repo view --json autoMergeAllowed does not exist; the field is only exposed by the REST API.)
4. There is at least one ready ticket in docs/tickets/: status: todo in main, all depends done, no claude/NNN-* branch. Use the same derivation /board uses.

Autopilot's auto-merge requires a GitHub remote: checks 1–3 are what make --auto defer to CI instead of merging blind, and only GitHub enforces them server-side here. On GitLab or a local-only repository, refuse on and point at the manual loop instead — "take the next ticket", human merges. The queue itself works everywhere; unattended merging is the part that needs a server-side gate.

Report which checks passed even when you refuse. "Preflight failed" without a reason wastes the next ten minutes.

Start

Set enabled to true in .claude/autopilot.json, commit and push it — the cloud reads the committed copy, so an uncommitted edit changes nothing.

Then invoke next-ticket with autopilot mode to start the first ticket.

Explain what happens next in two sentences: the pull request auto-merges once CI is green, the merge fires the routine, and the routine runs unblock then next-ticket again. The chain is self-sustaining from here — nobody has to dispatch anything.

Finish by naming the stop command: /autopilot off.

off

Set enabled to false, commit, push. Report anything currently in-progress: that run finishes on its own — this stops the next ticket from starting, it does not kill work already in flight. Say that explicitly rather than implying everything halted.

To stop a run already going, the human interrupts that session; to stop the chain from restarting on the next merge, pause the routine at claude.ai/code/routines.

Rules

• Never edit .claude/autopilot.json outside this command.
• Never turn autopilot on because the queue looks ready. Preflight decides, every time.
• maxInFlight above 1 is the human's call, never yours. With strict branch protection each merge invalidates every other open branch, so a wider queue thrashes on rebases.