ce-dogfood

---
name: ce-dogfood
description: Hands-off, diff-scoped browser QA of the active branch: maps user flows, drives a real browser, autonomously fixes small breakages with regression tests and commits, judges experience against product personas, and writes a durable dogfood report. Manual invocation only.
license: MIT
---

# Dogfood

Act as a QA engineer who dogfoods the **active branch** end-to-end, autonomously, until it is genuinely ready.

**Outcome:** every user-visible change this branch introduced has been driven in a real browser along its whole journey, judged for correctness and for how it feels to the product's personas, with small breakages fixed, regression-tested, and committed. **Done:** every matrix scenario is `Pass`, `Fixed`, `Skipped`, or in a terminal `Blocked` state; the project's automated suite has been run once and its result recorded; and the report at `<root>/dogfood-reports/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<branch-slug>-dogfood.md` is finalized against its template. A green matrix over a red suite finalizes as a not-ready verdict rather than a ready one. Chasing that suite green is not this run's job.

This is **diff-scoped**, not whole-app exploration. You test what *this branch* introduced or modified versus the trunk.

**Read `references/phases.md` before Phase 0 and follow it** — it owns every phase in detail, and the run cannot be executed correctly from the phase list below.

## Boundaries

- Drive the browser exclusively through the `agent-browser` CLI — never Chrome MCP tools (`mcp__claude-in-chrome__*`), another browser MCP, or a built-in browser-control tool, even when the platform offers one. Use the direct binary, never `npx agent-browser` (the direct binary uses the fast Rust client).
- Never dogfood the trunk on a branch-name or blank target — there is no diff. A PR target always has a base, so it is always diffable even when its head branch is named `main`.
- A numeric target stays a PR identity through isolation and checkout — never collapse it to its head ref, whose name may itself be `main`.
- Never switch the primary checkout out from under the user. This skill decides only whether to offer isolation — no for a blank or current-branch target (you are already on it), yes for a PR or another named ref — and `ce-worktree` owns the mechanics and the verdict. On a declined offer, check the target out in place, confirming first if uncommitted changes would be disturbed.
- Screenshots and other transient artifacts go to OS temp (`mktemp -d "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/ce-dogfood-XXXXXX"`), never the repo root; copy one in only to embed it in the report.
- Auto-fix only what is small, well-understood, and low-risk. A change that needs an architectural or schema decision, alters product behavior or UX intent, spans many files, or has plausible competing solutions is escalated to the report's **Decisions for a human** section, never implemented to clear a matrix item.

## Prerequisites

**User-runnable invocation rendering.** In prerequisite failures, default to `/ce-setup` and `/ce-dogfood <original arguments>`; use `$ce-setup` and `$ce-dogfood <original arguments>` only when the active host is Codex or explicitly documents dollar-prefixed skill invocation. On oh-my-pi (`omp`), use `/skill:ce-setup` and `/skill:ce-dogfood <original arguments>`. Render only each invocation as inline code and output one form only.

- A local dev server you can start (`bin/dev`, `rails server`, `npm run dev`, etc.).
- `agent-browser` installed. Check:

  ```bash
  command -v agent-browser >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "Ready" || echo "NOT INSTALLED"
  ```

  If not installed, stop and tell the user to install `agent-browser`: print the rendered `ce-setup` invocation for the current install command, followed by the rendered `ce-dogfood <original arguments>` invocation to retry. This workflow cannot function without it.

## Artifact Root

Reports live under `<root>/dogfood-reports/` and personas under `<root>/personas/`. Resolve `<root>` the first time you compose any `<root>/` path, whether you are reading or writing, and never before. A run that composes none skips it.

<!-- ce-docs-root:start -->
**Resolve the CE artifact root `<root>` before composing any artifact path.**

- **Read** `docs_root` from `<repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.yaml` only (`<repo-root>` = `git rev-parse --show-toplevel`). Do not read it from `config.local.yaml`. Unset -> `<root>` is `docs`, exactly as before.
- **Validate** a set value: a repo-relative directory whose real, symlink-resolved path stays inside the repo and is neither the repo root nor under `.git/`. Otherwise stop with an error naming `docs_root` and the value -- never fall back to `docs`.
- **Use** `<root>` as the sole artifact location: create it if absent, compose each path as `<root>/<subdir>` with this skill's own subdirectory, and never also read `docs`.
<!-- ce-docs-root:end -->

## Delegation

`ce-dogfood` is an orchestrator: prefer an existing CE skill over re-deriving its behavior. Isolate a PR or named-branch target with `ce-worktree`; take a non-obvious root cause to `ce-debug`; commit each fix with `ce-commit`; capture a reusable lesson with `ce-compound`.

## Phase order

Scope -> analyze the diff -> map the flows -> derive the matrix -> serve -> execute -> fix loop -> report. The order is the invariant: the flow model precedes the matrix, and the matrix precedes any browser work. Each phase's conditions are in `references/phases.md` — read it before Phase 0 rather than reconstructing a phase from this line. Work one scenario at a time, judged for correctness *and* for how it feels to each persona. A fix is not done until a regression test fails before it and passes after, or the report says why no automated test was meaningful.

**Checkpoint, not a final write.** Create the report from `references/dogfood-report-template.md` as soon as the matrix exists, with every scenario at `Pending`, and update it after each scenario is judged and each fix is committed. `<branch-slug>` is the branch name lowercased, with every run of non-alphanumeric characters — slashes included — collapsed to one `-`. Find a prior run by globbing `<root>/dogfood-reports/*-<branch-slug>-dogfood.md`. The task list is session-scoped, but the report on disk is what a later run or a teammate resumes from, so an interrupted run must leave a template-shaped checkpoint rather than a bare matrix.

**Terminal states.** `Blocked (needs human verify)` (an external-interaction leg — OAuth, real email, payments, SMS — that cannot be driven headlessly) and `Blocked (human decision)` (a fix too big to make autonomously) both wait on a person, and each ends that scenario, not the run: continue the rest of the matrix, and never silently re-queue a blocked scenario, on this run or on resume. How a person is reached differs per state, and the phase that sets the state says which.