The rule said one approving review. On a four-person team where the author is
usually the only person awake, that meant every merge went through
`gh pr merge --admin` — so the requirement was not producing review, it was
producing a habit of bypassing the branch rule. A control everyone routes around
is worse than no control: it still shows up green in an audit.
Zero required approvals, and the rest of the protection stays exactly as it was.
Nothing lands on main without a PR; nothing merges with red CI. That is the part
a team this size actually gets value from, and it costs no waiting.
What was being protected here was never code review. It was that nothing reaches
production unnoticed, and that funds cannot move on one person's say-so. Both
live elsewhere: production waits on the environment gate, and fund movement is
going behind on-chain multisig — where a stolen account cannot forge a second
signature the way a collected token can forge a second approval.
Drift check passes against live settings.
Both were configured by hand through the GitHub API today. Nothing in the repo
reflected them, so they were invisible here, unversioned, and removable without
a trace — which undercuts their purpose, since they exist so that nothing reaches
main or production unreviewed.
apply-repo-settings.sh is now the source of truth for both, and idempotent: each
call PUTs the full desired state rather than stacking changes. --check reports
drift without touching anything, which is what makes this useful later — a
setting silently relaxed is otherwise only discovered when it matters.
Documented alongside it: why CI Gate ✅ is the only required check (it is an
aggregate that already inspects the others, and listing each job would mean a
rename quietly drops a requirement), and why enforce_admins stays false (an
incident needs an escape hatch — rare, visible, recorded).
This is the same class of problem as the migrations fixed earlier today: state
that only exists because someone once clicked something, with no record of what
or why.
SatoshiQaziMuhammed