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title: Agentic Pairing mode status: experimental kind: feature mode: Pairing source: > MISSION.md § Technical scope (Pairing) and § Initial Goals ("Ship at least one Pairing skill family in v1"). docs/modes.md § Pairing (experimental, 2 skills). acceptance:

• At least one Agentic Pairing skill exists and validates (v1 goal).
• Agentic Pairing skills run in the developer's OWN dev loop and make no state change on behalf of the project (read-only / hand-back).
• Mentorship is intrinsic: the agent handles implementation-detail review so the human conversation stays on design and reasoning.

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Agentic Pairing mode

What it does

The developer-side counterpart to the project-side modes. Agentic Pairing skills run in a maintainer's or contributor's own dev loop: multi-agent review pipelines, self-review and pre-flight patterns, and scoped fix drafting under the developer's driver's seat. Mentorship is intrinsic — the agent absorbs mechanical implementation-detail review so the human-to-human conversation stays on design and the trade-offs the project cares about, protecting the ASF contribution path (contributor → committer → PMC).

Where it lives

• Skill: pairing-self-review — structured pre-flight self-review of local changes before opening a PR. Read-only; returns a structured report with no external writes. Ships mode: Pairing + experimental.
• Skill: pairing-multi-agent-review — fans the diff through three independent, axis-focused sub-agents (correctness, security, conventions); merges findings with deduplication and severity ranking into a report in the same format as pairing-self-review. Each pass is isolated so findings from one axis cannot suppress or bias the others. Read-only; no state change. Ships mode: Pairing + experimental.

Behaviour & contract

• No state change on the project's behalf. Agentic Pairing skills are the developer's toolkit; they end at a report or a local branch.
• Same skill format and sandbox/privacy posture as the project-side modes.
• Evidence-gated dependency-version findings. pairing-self-review inventories every mandatory direct and transitive constraint path, applies environment markers, and classifies the effective intersection as broken, compatible, or unknown before surfacing a compatibility finding. An empty intersection is always broken (uninstallable), never unknown. Every such finding carries the complete constraint ledger. Remediation follows policy read from the resolved explicit base commit, the default merge base, or HEAD for staged-only review; it never follows policy introduced by the changes under review or copies conventions from another project.
• Ships before Agentic Autonomous in the roadmap (MISSION sequencing): Agentic Pairing must establish that human reasoning, not implementation chatter, is the load-bearing part of the workflow before any auto-merge is considered.

Out of scope

• Acting on issues/PRs/threads on the project's behalf (that is Agentic Triage/Agentic Mentoring/Agentic Drafting).
• Agentic Autonomous — deliberately off by MISSION sequencing; not built.

Acceptance criteria

1. ≥1 Agentic Pairing skill exists, validates, and is read-only/hand-back.
2. docs/modes.md Agentic Pairing row reflects the shipped count and status.
3. pairing-multi-agent-review fans through three independent passes and merges findings without cross-pass anchoring.
4. pairing-self-review never surfaces a dependency-version compatibility finding without a complete constraint ledger and a supported broken, compatible, or unknown classification. Remediation follows adopter policy read from the resolved explicit base commit, the default merge base, or staged-only HEAD.

Validation

ls .claude/skills/ | grep -q '^magpie-pairing-' && echo "pairing skills present" || echo "GAP: no pairing skills"
uv run --project tools/skill-and-tool-validator --group dev skill-and-tool-validate

Known gaps

• experimental — no adopter pilot has run. Both pairing-self-review and pairing-multi-agent-review shipped; no contributor-sentiment evaluation has run yet; shape may change.