ADR 0098: Accept refreshes the landing checkout

Amendments.

• Vocabulary: current spellings are accept (formerly graduate), update (formerly integrate), and known/custom job (formerly gate capability / custom check); the decision and reasoning are unchanged.
• ADR 0110 — landing modes: the --to branch / --to trunk modes referenced below were removed — accept always lands on the trunk now. The decision itself stands: acceptance still refreshes the trunk checkout it leaves behind.
• ADR 0153 — convergence extension: refresh is now the first post-landing checkout-convergence step; acceptance then runs [repository].ensure, the configured smoke job, and a tracked-drift check before completing worktree cleanup.
• ADR 0313 — setup checkout convergence: setup acceptance applies the same receiving-checkout guarantee to the main checkout that survives its branch switch. It requires an empty tracked-refresh plan and materializes checkout-local agent artifacts before the exact trunk transition, so its first status has no setup-caused repair action.

Status: accepted

discern refresh materializes the local artifacts that agents actually read: generated guidance files, skills, and provider integrations. The gate catches stale generated files, and status reports stale or missing artifacts, but a worktree can still accept a committed change to guidance or config while the main checkout's ignored artifacts remain from the previous tree. The next agent that starts on the trunk then sees a correct status warning and has to repair what acceptance could have repaired deterministically.

update already bundles its merge with a refresh because a merge can bring in guidance or skill sources from another branch. Acceptance is the opposite transition: it hands a finished branch out to the main checkout. The same source changes can make the receiving checkout stale.

discern accept refreshes the checkout it leaves behind after the git landing has completed:

• --to trunk fast-forwards the trunk, removes the worktree, deletes the merged branch, then runs the refresh in the trunk checkout.
• --to branch removes the worktree, checks out the review branch in the main checkout, then runs the refresh in that review checkout.

The refresh is listed in --dry-run and serialized as a normal refresh step in --json. A partial refresh does not undo the landing: the branch has already been handed off or merged, so the result records a failed refresh step and hints to run discern refresh in the main checkout.

The branch path intentionally does not refresh the trunk. The trunk has not changed when work is left on a review branch; the future operation that lands that reviewed branch onto the trunk must refresh the trunk at that point.

Agents that start on the trunk after accept --to trunk inherit current local artifacts instead of immediately seeing a stale-generated warning caused by the acceptance itself. Agents reviewing a branch after accept --to branch also get a coherent checkout.

Acceptance performs one more post-landing mutation, but it remains visible in the plan/apply result model and reuses the same refresh core as the standalone verb. A refresh failure is loud without making the already-completed git landing ambiguous.

accept --to branch still leaves a separate trunk landing problem. That is outside this decision because the trunk has not yet received the reviewed branch.

• Leave refresh manual after acceptance. Rejected because this preserves the failure mode: the next agent notices the stale checkout even though the lifecycle verb had enough information to repair it.
• Refresh only for --to trunk. Rejected because the review-branch checkout can also be stale after acceptance, and that is the checkout the user or next agent is placed in.
• Refresh both the review branch and trunk for --to branch. Rejected because trunk has not changed. Refreshing it would be unrelated work in a checkout accept did not land onto.
• Make refresh failure roll back acceptance. Rejected because the git transition has already succeeded. A partial artifact refresh is repairable; undoing a branch handoff or trunk fast-forward would be more surprising.