Modes — MISSION taxonomy mapped to current skills

MISSION.md frames the framework around five toggleable modes of agent-assisted repository maintainership and development: Agentic Triage, Agentic Mentoring, Agentic Drafting (agent-authored fixes with human review), Agentic Pairing (developer-side dev-cycle skills with mentorship intrinsic), and Agentic Autonomous (limited fix-and-merge). Each adopting project picks the modes that match its culture and risk tolerance.

This document maps that taxonomy to the skills that currently ship in the framework. It is the honest snapshot — modes that are not yet implemented are listed as such, with a tracking issue or roadmap pointer rather than a placeholder shell. Read MISSION.md for the why of each mode and the sequencing commitments behind them.

Status legend

Status	Meaning
stable	Implemented, in use by at least one adopter, behaviour expected to remain backward-compatible across minor framework versions.
experimental	Implemented but not yet covered by an adopter pilot or contributor-sentiment evaluation; shape may change.
proposed	Designed in `MISSION.md` but no skill yet exists; tracked for future implementation.
off	Deliberately not implemented per a MISSION-level sequencing rule (Agentic Autonomous).

Modes at a glance

The Mode column below holds the canonical identifier used in each skill’s mode: frontmatter (and validated against this table). The display name carried in the docs and on the site prefixes it with Agentic — Agentic Triage, Agentic Mentoring, Agentic Drafting, Agentic Pairing, and Agentic Autonomous (the renamed former Auto-merge).

Mode	Purpose	Status	Skill count
Triage	(Agentic Triage) Issues, security reports, PRs: spot, classify, route, surface duplicates. Every output is a suggestion the human signs off on.	stable (security) / experimental (pr-management, issue-management, contributor-nomination, repo-health, release-management)	33
Mentoring	(Agentic Mentoring) Joins issue and PR threads in a teaching register: clarifying questions, pointers to project conventions, paired examples from prior PRs, hand-off to a human when scope exceeds the agent. Also authors net-new good first issues, curates the existing backlog, and explains filed issues to newcomers to lower onboarding latency.	experimental	7
Drafting	(Agentic Drafting) Agent drafts a fix for a well-scoped problem and opens a PR; every PR is reviewed and merged by a human committer.	stable (security-only); experimental (issue-management, audit-findings, release-management family)	9
Pairing	(Agentic Pairing) Developer-side dev-cycle skills with mentorship intrinsic — multi-agent review pipelines, self-review and pre-flight patterns, scoped fix drafting under the developer’s driver’s seat.	experimental	3
Agentic Autonomous	Auto-merge restricted to objectively boring change classes only (lint, dependency bumps inside an allow-list, license-header insertion, formatting, broken-link repair).	off	0

A few skills sit outside the mode taxonomy by design — see Outside the modes below.

Triage

Inbound report and PR triage. The lowest-risk surface and the foundation everything else builds on. Skills propose labels, spot duplicates, link related discussions, classify reports against prior triaged cases, and route to the right human; they do not act without human review.

Skill	Domain	Status
`pr-management-triage`	Generic PR queue triage.	experimental
`pr-management-stats`	PR-queue reporting (supports triage decisions).	experimental
`pr-management-code-review`	Maintainer-facing deep code review.	experimental
`reviewer-routing`	Suggest a primary reviewer and optional backup for an open issue or PR from the configured roster, touched areas, git-history familiarity, and current review load; waits for maintainer confirmation before any assignment or review request.	experimental
`issue-triage`	General-issue-tracker triage (per-issue classification + disposition proposal).	experimental
`issue-reassess`	Pool-level sweep of resolved / EOL issues for re-assessment.	experimental
`issue-stale-sweep`	Sweep open issues for inactivity past a configurable threshold; proposes a nudge (`REQUEST-UPDATE`) or a pre-close notice (`CLOSE-STALE`); waits for maintainer confirmation before posting.	experimental
`pr-stale-sweep`	Sweep open PRs for inactivity past a configurable threshold; proposes a nudge (`REQUEST-UPDATE`) or a pre-close notice (`CLOSE-STALE`); skips maintainer-court and ready-labelled PRs; waits for maintainer confirmation before posting.	experimental
`issue-backlog-stats`	Read-only maintainer dashboard for the open general-issue backlog: health rating, age/staleness breakdowns, area pressure ranking, and triage-funnel summary.	experimental
`issue-deduplicate`	Merge two open `<issue-tracker>` issues that describe the same root cause, preserving both reporters’ context; proposes closure comment on the duplicate and a cross-reference on the kept issue.	experimental
`contributor-nomination`	Nomination-readiness brief for a named contributor — activity breadth, consistency, and evidence prose for a committer or PMC thread.	experimental
`security-issue-import`	Inbound security-report classification + initial routing.	stable
`security-issue-import-from-pr`	Open a tracker from a security-relevant public PR.	stable
`security-issue-import-from-md`	Bulk-import findings from a markdown report.	stable
`security-issue-deduplicate`	Merge two trackers describing the same root-cause vulnerability.	stable
`security-issue-invalidate`	Close a tracker as invalid with a polite-but-firm reporter reply.	stable
`security-issue-sync`	Reconcile a tracker against its mail thread, fix PR, release train, and archives.	stable
`security-cve-allocate`	Allocate a CVE for a tracker (Vulnogram URL + paste-ready JSON).	stable
`security-issue-triage`	Batch-triage open tracker issues carrying `needs triage`; classifies each into one of six dispositions and posts a proposal comment on confirmation.	experimental
`security-issue-import-via-forwarder`	Sub-skill of `security-issue-import` / `-invalidate` / `-sync` for the relay/forwarder case: reports relayed by an upstream broker (e.g. ASF security team) rather than arriving directly from the reporter.	experimental
`security-issue-import-from-scan`	Triage a security scanner’s multi-finding output (via the `scan-format` adapter) into per-finding dispositions; opens tracker issues only after operator confirmation of the triage decisions.	experimental
`contributor-activity-sweep`	Read-only GitHub activity card for a named contributor: PR authorship, code-review participation, issues, and comments over a configurable window.	experimental
`contributor-sentiment`	Measures contributor-sentiment signals (thread tone, time-to-first-reply, first-PR retention, reviewer load) and produces the structured gate report for experimental→stable advancement.	experimental
`pr-management-quick-merge`	Identify trivial, low-risk PRs in the `ready for maintainer review` queue that pass every quality gate and touch only supplementary areas (docs, changelog, translations, tests); surfaces candidates with diff summaries and the exact merge command.	experimental
`ci-runner-audit`	Read-only audit of GitHub Actions workflow runner compatibility across one repo, an explicit set, one Apache project’s repos, or the full Apache GitHub org.	experimental
`dependency-audit`	Read-only dependency vulnerability audit: detects the project’s dependency manager(s), runs the appropriate audit tool, surfaces patchable findings grouped by severity, and proposes upgrades for maintainer review.	experimental
`workflow-security-audit`	Read-only GitHub Actions workflow security audit powered by `zizmor`: surfaces injection vulnerabilities, excessive permissions, unpinned external actions, and self-hosted-runner fork-secret leaks.	experimental
`license-compliance-audit`	Read-only license-compliance audit: LICENSE presence, NOTICE completeness when required, and SPDX-header consistency across source files; proposes remedies for maintainer review.	experimental
`flaky-test-triage`	Read-only flaky-test detection from CI run history: per-job failure-rate analysis over a configurable window, separating intermittent (flaky) from deterministic failures.	experimental
`release-verify-rc`	Read-only pre-flight on a staged RC: signatures against project KEYS, checksums, license headers (Apache RAT), NOTICE/LICENSE diff, no prohibited binaries, version-string consistency. Doubles as an Agentic Pairing-mode skill voters run in their own dev loop.	experimental
`release-vote-tally`	Fetch the approval signal for an RC, classify each reply (+1 / 0 / -1) binding vs non-binding against the configured roster, produce the tally summary, and draft the `[RESULT] [VOTE]` email. Conservative on ambiguous votes, refuses to count.	experimental
`release-archive-sweep`	Scan `dist/release/<project>/`, identify releases past retention, propose the `svn mv` sequence to `archive.apache.org`.	experimental
`release-audit-report`	Per-release structured report (RM, voters with binding flags, artefacts with sigs and checksums, promote revision, `[ANNOUNCE]` archive URL) appended to the project’s audit log.	experimental

Three notes on the boundaries:

pr-management-code-review is a deeper variant of triage — the agent reads diff and surrounding code rather than only metadata, but the output is still a suggestion for the human reviewer. It belongs to Agentic Triage by the same rule.
security-cve-allocate is procedural rather than classificatory (CVE allocation happens after assessment), but it shares Agentic Triage’s shape: the agent prepares a paste-ready artefact, the human PMC member submits it. Listed here for navigability.
The four release-* Agentic Triage skills share the same paste-ready- artefact shape: release-verify-rc reports pass/fail per check, release-vote-tally proposes [RESULT], release-archive-sweep proposes an svn mv sequence, release-audit-report proposes an audit-log append. None of them flip state labels or publish artefacts, see docs/release-management/spec.md § Cross-cutting commitments.

Mentoring

Status: experimental. 7 skills shipped.

MISSION.md § Agentic Mentoring names this the highest-value project-side mode and the one off-the-shelf agent tooling skips. The spec — tone guide, hand-off protocol, adopter contract — landed ahead of the skill code so the project’s tone choices were reviewable independently from the runtime behaviour.

Skill	Purpose	Status
`pr-management-mentor`	Draft a teaching-register comment on a single GitHub issue or PR thread; waits for maintainer confirmation before posting.	experimental
`good-first-issue-author`	Draft one net-new good first issue from a supplied gap or small task (suitability gate + readiness checklist); waits for maintainer confirmation before filing.	experimental
`mentoring-welcome`	Draft a first-contact orientation comment for a first-time contributor on a newly opened issue or PR; detects first-time authorship via `author_association`, drafts a welcome with contributing-guide link and expected next steps; waits for maintainer confirmation before posting.	experimental
`contributor-to-committer`	Read-only readiness tracker mapping a contributor’s GitHub activity against the adopter’s PMC-declared committer/PMC thresholds; surfaces a traffic-light brief (Not yet / Approaching / Ready to nominate) plus the specific evidence gaps that remain.	experimental
`good-first-issue-sweep`	Sweep the open issue backlog for existing issues that could be labelled as good first issues; scores each against the G1–G7 suitability rubric and classifies as READY / NEAR-MISS / SKIP; proposes labels only after explicit maintainer confirmation.	experimental
`onboarding-concierge`	Answer a newcomer’s “how do I contribute here” question by grounding the response in `CONTRIBUTING.md` and the project’s own docs; classifies the question (setup / workflow / first-issue), retrieves the relevant excerpt, and drafts a concise answer; hands off to a human for design, security, or out-of-scope questions.	experimental
`newcomer-issue-explainer`	Given an open good-first-issue, explain it in beginner terms and sketch a concrete approach (file pointers, done-definition, where to ask); assessment gate declines closed, security-sensitive, or scope-unclear issues; nothing is posted without maintainer confirmation.	experimental

Doc	Purpose
`docs/mentoring/README.md`	Family overview, current status, planned shape.
`docs/mentoring/spec.md`	Full spec: scope, triggers, register, hand-off, adopter knobs.
`projects/_template/mentoring-config.md`	Adopter-config scaffold (required before running the skill).

The prototype ships flagged mode: Mentoring + experimental. Shape may change as adopter pilots and contributor-sentiment evaluation land. The skill is read-only by default and never posts without explicit maintainer confirmation — see pr-management-mentor/SKILL.md for the full contract.

The closest existing surface is pr-management-triage/comment-templates.md, which carries Agentic Triage classification responses — informational, not pedagogical. It is not Agentic Mentoring.

Drafting

The agent drafts a fix for a well-scoped problem (a tracked issue, a triaged security report with team consensus on scope, a failing test with an obvious cause, a documentation hole) and opens a PR. Every PR is reviewed and merged by a human committer; the agent never merges its own work.

Skill	Domain	Status
`security-issue-fix`	Draft a fix PR in `<upstream>` from a triaged, CVE-allocated tracker.	stable (security-only)
`issue-fix-workflow`	Draft a fix for a triaged general-issue-tracker issue (BUG or FEATURE-REQUEST).	experimental
`audit-finding-fix`	Draft fixes for non-security audit-tool findings (lint violations, type errors, CodeQL alerts, doc-coverage gaps); re-runs the tool after each batch to confirm findings are cleared.	experimental
`release-prepare`	Planning issue + version-bump / changelog / NOTICE / LICENSE prep PR (Steps 1-2). Also the post-release `-SNAPSHOT` bump (Step 14).	experimental
`release-keys-sync`	Draft the `KEYS` diff for a new Release Manager (Step 3). Agent never holds the private key.	experimental
`release-rc-cut`	Paste-ready command sequence: signed tag, build, detached signatures, checksums, `svn import` to `dist/dev/` (Steps 4-5). Agent never signs and never imports.	experimental
`release-vote-draft`	Draft the `[VOTE]` email body to `dev@<project>` (Step 7). Agent never sends.	experimental
`release-promote`	Emit the backend-shaped promotion command set for a release that has passed its vote; proposes the `promoted` label. Agent never runs the promotion command and never publishes the release.	experimental
`release-announce-draft`	Draft the `[ANNOUNCE]` email body for `announce@apache.org` and the site-bump PR (Step 11). Agent never sends mail and never merges the PR.	experimental

audit-finding-fix extends Agentic Drafting to non-security audit-tool findings: lint violations, type errors, CodeQL alerts, and documentation-coverage gaps. It is the generic-Agentic Drafting companion to issue-fix-workflow (issue-tracker bugs) and security-issue-fix (security-class findings). Failing tests with an obvious cause remain proposed.

The release-* skills form a single family (docs/release-management/README.md) spanning Agentic Drafting (Steps 1–5, 7, 10–11, 14) and Agentic Triage (Steps 6, 9, 12–13). All ten have now shipped experimental. They share the security family’s discipline that every state-changing action is a proposal the human executes — see docs/release-management/spec.md § Cross-cutting commitments.

For security-class Agentic Drafting PRs, the public surface strips CVE and private context per the project’s disclosure policy, so the public surface stays clean until the embargo lifts — see AGENTS.md § Confidentiality for the rules the skill enforces.

Pairing

Status: experimental. 3 skills.

MISSION.md § Agentic Pairing introduces this mode as the developer-side counterpart to the project-side modes. Where Agentic Triage / Agentic Mentoring / Agentic Drafting / Agentic Autonomous describe the agent’s presence on the project’s own infrastructure, Agentic Pairing skills run in the maintainer’s or contributor’s own dev loop — multi-agent review pipelines, self-review and pre-flight patterns, scoped fix drafting under the developer’s driver’s seat. Mentorship is intrinsic to Agentic Pairing skills: the agent handles the mechanical, implementation-detail review (formatting, conventions, lint-grade nits) so the human conversation between contributor and maintainer — and between peer maintainers — stays on design, reasoning, and the trade-offs the project cares about. Agentic Pairing skills are the platform’s mechanism for protecting the ASF contribution path (contributor → committer → PMC) against being eroded by automation that replaces, rather than augments, the human-to-human relationships that path is built on.

Agentic Pairing skills don’t make state changes on behalf of the project; they share the same skill format and security posture as the project-side modes, so a maintainer who already trusts the framework for Agentic Triage gets the same posture for the patches they write themselves.

Skill	Domain	Status
`pairing-self-review`	Pre-flight self-review of local changes before opening a PR. Read-only; returns a structured report.	experimental
`pairing-multi-agent-review`	Fan a diff through three independent review passes (correctness, security, conventions) and merge findings.	experimental
`pre-first-pr-check`	Newcomer-facing pre-flight checklist: SPDX headers, commit-message shape, Generated-by trailer, placeholder convention. Read-only.	experimental

Sequencing. Agentic Pairing ships before Agentic Autonomous in the project’s automation roadmap — full auto-merge of maintainer-driven changes follows only after Agentic Pairing has established that human reasoning and relationships, not implementation chatter, are the load-bearing parts of the workflow.

Doc	Purpose
`docs/pairing/README.md`	Family overview: skills, when to use each, adopter contract.

Agentic Autonomous

Status: off. Deliberately not implemented.

MISSION.md § Agentic Autonomous holds auto-merge off until Agentic Triage, Agentic Mentoring, Agentic Drafting, and Agentic Pairing have been running for two quarters and contributor-sentiment data says the project is healthier, not just faster. Security-class changes are explicitly out of Agentic Autonomous — no auto-merge ever touches anything embargoed or CVE-tagged.

The framework’s current .asf.yaml configuration reflects this posture: pull_requests.allow_auto_merge is set to false (.asf.yaml).

When Agentic Autonomous ships, the eligible change classes will be declared per-adopter in <project-config>/ and gated by an allow-list that the framework refuses to grow without an adopter PR.

Outside the modes

Several skills are framework infrastructure rather than maintainership modes. They support adoption, isolation, and upgrade flows; they do not act on issues, PRs, or contributor threads on their own.

Skill	Purpose
`setup`	Adopt the framework into an adopter repo; manage the snapshot, symlinks, and overrides.
`issue-reproducer`	Per-issue code extraction + execution; produces structured evidence. Read-only on the tracker.
`issue-reassess-stats`	Read-only dashboard over reassessment-campaign verdict.json files.
`setup-isolated-setup-install`	Install the credential-isolation sandbox harness.
`setup-isolated-setup-update`	Update pinned system tools (`bubblewrap`, `socat`, agent CLI) past the cooldown window.
`setup-isolated-setup-verify`	Read-only health check of the sandbox harness.
`setup-override-upstream`	Promote an adopter’s local override into a framework PR.
`setup-shared-config-sync`	Sync shared configuration across worktrees.
`setup-isolated-setup-doctor`	In-session functional health check of the secure-agent sandbox: probes SSH agent / Yubikey reachability, localhost port access, and filesystem restrictions.
`setup-status`	Render a Markdown adoption dashboard: install method and pin, drift, and which skills are wired in the current repo.
`committer-onboarding`	Post-vote committer and PMC onboarding for Apache projects: walks the nominator through every step from ICLA check to welcome announcement for both podlings and TLPs.
`security-tracker-stats-dashboard`	Generate a self-contained HTML dashboard of `<tracker>` statistics (lifecycle-band breakdowns, time-to-triage trends, velocity) without modifying any tracker state.
`optimize-skill`	Optimize an existing framework skill by applying restructuring patterns: split oversized SKILL.md into linked sibling docs, trim frontmatter, improve eval alignment.
`list-skills`	Print a live index of every skill in this repository grouped by family, with each skill’s name and first-sentence description.
`write-skill`	Author a new framework skill or update an existing one: frontmatter, placeholder convention, injection defences, Privacy-LLM gate-check, and validator sign-off.

The setup* skills ship as a single setup family — see docs/setup/README.md. The remaining skills (committer-onboarding, security-tracker-stats-dashboard, optimize-skill, list-skills, write-skill) are standalone framework utilities.

Mode lifecycle

A mode moves through four states as it matures:

proposed — designed in MISSION.md, no skill code yet. Spec PRs may land before any skill code so tone, scope, and adopter knobs are reviewable in isolation.
experimental — at least one skill exists, behaviour may change, no adopter pilot has run an evaluation. Adopters can opt-in but should expect breaking changes between framework versions.
stable — at least one adopter is running the mode in production, behaviour is backward-compatible across minor framework versions. The default state for skills shipped to adopters.
graduated-to-Agentic-Autonomous-eligible (future state; Agentic Triage, Agentic Mentoring, Agentic Drafting, and Agentic Pairing only) — the mode has run stable for two quarters with positive contributor-sentiment evidence, the framework will start considering an equivalent change class for Agentic Autonomous. This state does not exist yet because Agentic Autonomous itself is off.

A mode can be retracted from any state. The retraction triggers MISSION names — sustained negative contributor sentiment, a confidentiality leak, a sandbox bypass that escapes detection — apply per-adopter and per-mode. A retraction in one adopter does not auto-retract in another, but the framework records it for cross-adopter pattern detection.

Cross-references

MISSION.md — the why of each mode, the sequencing commitments, and the privacy/security/vendor- neutrality posture each mode inherits.
README.md — adopter-facing skill family table; this document is the maintainer-facing taxonomy view of the same skills.
AGENTS.md — repository-level rules every mode inherits (external content as data, polite-but-firm tone, brevity, confidentiality).
docs/mode-economics.md — indicative token-cost shape per mode and model class; for maintainers evaluating adoption.