Contributing

You will be able to make a change to commission — code or documentation — and get it through the same gates everyone else does, without asking anyone what the conventions are.

Commission is developed with commission. There is no second place where work is tracked, no status document, and no markdown board: commission next --claim is how you get something to do, and commission done is how you finish it. The whole loop — plus the test conventions and the release process — is working on commission, with commission.

The repository is private and the software is proprietary. LICENSE LICENSE grants no rights and is explicit that contribution requires a written agreement with the copyright holder first; access to the repository is not that agreement. See licensing.

Pages

page	you will be able to	status	owner
`documentation.md`	Write or regenerate a documentation page correctly, and know which pages must never be hand-edited.	written	`relay-58`
`working-with-commission.md`	Use commission to work on commission: claim a task, leave notes, attach evidence, satisfy the gate — plus the test conventions, the generated-versus-written rule, and the release process.	written	`relay-61`
`development.md`	Go deeper on the repository itself: the layout of `src/` module by module, and the local tooling around it.	planned	`relay-61`
`../compatibility.md`	Know what commission promises not to break, per surface, and what “break” means for each.	written (still at the `docs/` root)	`relay-49`
`../release-checklist.md`	Cut a release, step by step, with no step that says “verify things look right”.	written (still at the `docs/` root)	`relay-49`

The short version

bun install
bun test                 # the whole suite, including the docs drift test
bun run typecheck

Before you finish anything:

bun run generate:docs    # if you changed the CLI, apply schema, or MCP tools
bun run generate:config   # if you changed the config schema

Both are idempotent. If either produces a diff you did not expect, that diff is the documentation change your source change implied — commit it.

The rules that are not negotiable

Never track status in a markdown file. Query commission. A file that says what is done is a second truth, and the second truth is always the wrong one.
Never hand-edit a generated page. See documentation — the next generator run reverts you, and in the meantime the docs lie.
Never fabricate evidence. A benchmark number nobody ran is worse than an unfinished task, because it closes the loop that was supposed to catch it.
Do not --force past a gate unless a human asked you to. The override is recorded, requires a reason, and shows up in the event log and the standup.

This page is docs/contributing/index.md in the Commission repository, rendered in place — the site keeps no copy of it. The repository is private, so there is no edit link to follow.