Agentic Pairing mode

June 29, 2026 · View on GitHub

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.

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.
  • 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.

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.