dispatch-qa-walk

What it does

This skill dispatches QA’s product walk: the gate that judges the running system instead of the diff. It builds on review-with-rin’s gate-file setup and pane form rather than restating them, and adds the one thing a walk needs that no other gate does: an environment.

Thomas creates a gate worktree at the reviewed SHA, starts the app there with the project’s own command, then packs a brief with:

• Persona and data state.
• Every surface showing the same concept, not only the changed ones.
• Design guidelines.
• Browser consent and any authorized mutation.
• The previous verified-clean list.

From there it dispatches QA as a gate pane, collects the report, then stops the app and confirms the port is free before removing the worktree.

The problem it handles is that reading a diff and using a product are different acts, and a green test suite proves neither. A test asserts what somebody thought to assert; what is missing, misordered, unreadable or unreachable on the actual screen is exactly what nobody wrote an assertion for.

This gap is not hypothetical. An earlier harness version shipped a browser-walking agent across several releases that never ran once; a separate project logged nine fold rounds and a merge in half a day with QA never dispatched at all. So this skill carries its own counter: more than ten merges touching a user-visible surface since the last walk is a STOP, and “none touched a surface” is a valid answer while “not counted” is not.

When Thomas reaches for it

Prerequisites

• You are Thomas: this recipe is Thomas-only, the same precondition as review-with-rin.
• The project has a rendering path documented in its entry doc. Where there is none, a walk cannot run, and that itself is a finding for the owner.
• Browser consent and any authorized mutation are named exactly in the dispatch. Without them QA declines and records a COVERAGE GAP.
• The previous verified-clean list, if one exists, comes from .astraler/state/qa-verified-clean.md. Where there is none, QA runs full instead of guessing what was covered.

What it leaves behind

Known failures

• Shipped but wired to nothing. A browser-walking agent shipped for several releases and never ran once; no contract owned it, no dispatcher named it. Promoted, fixed by wiring (contract, dispatcher, reachability check), not by the missing file itself.
• Its own queue was invisible to itself. The verifier’s own dispatch queue was invisible to itself, so the run point had to follow the artifact instead of a schedule. Promoted, cited by this skill and thomas.md.
• Moved text kept stale names. Moving the walk’s mechanics out of review-with-rin carried three stale lines still naming the walker “Rin” and calling the walk “a mode.” Promoted, moved text is not re-homed until it is re-read in context.
• Teardown once stopped a shared container. A running app leaks broker processes and database containers per walk; one badly scoped teardown once stopped a shared test container every live Builder stood on. Promoted, cleanup runs in order: kill the app, confirm the port, scoped teardown, then --force the worktree.

It’s working if

• The app ran in its own worktree at the reviewed SHA, never in the Builder’s checkout.
• Both $GATE_FILE and $VERIFIED_CLEAN_FILE exist, are non-empty, and were copied into .astraler/state/ before the gate worktree was removed.
• The brief named every surface showing the changed concept, not only those in the diff.
• The app was killed and the port confirmed free before git worktree remove --force ran.
• A qa(walk): marker sits at the walked head, so the walk left a trace the merge gate counts.

Where it fits

A ticket closes through /skills/dispatch-ticket, /skills/review-with-rin reads the diff and checks that the process left its traces, and dispatch-qa-walk is the gate beside it that reads nothing. It drives the running product instead, because a coherent diff and a coherent product are different claims. Findings from both gates route the same way: qa advises, Thomas classifies, the Builder fixes, and a genuine product decision goes to the owner. The walk runs inside a gate and a worktree it force-removes at cleanup, which is why the verified-clean list has to be written outside that worktree first.