dev, rolling, main

Every change climbs the same three-rung ladder before it reaches everyone. Each rung is a branch, and each step up runs a bigger gate. That way, new work reaches early adopters fast, and stable releases stay stable.

A story's pull request squash-merges into dev when its gate is green; dev is promoted to rolling when the rolling gate passes, tagged rolling and the date; rolling is promoted to main when the stable gate passes, tagged with a version.

Three rungs. A gate at every step.

The three rungs

Branch	What it is	Who uses it
`dev`	Where every merged pull request lands. Always builds, but not a release	The team, every day
`rolling`	A snapshot of `dev` promoted on a schedule, tagged `rolling-<date>`	Early adopters who want the latest
`main`	A stable release, promoted from `rolling` on a deliberate decision, tagged `vX.Y.Z`	Everyone else

The gates

Into dev: the pull request's own checks, the merge gate, and a person's yes.
Into rolling: the rolling gate on the exact merge commit: unit and integration tests, benchmarks, a production check, and the evals for the skills.
Into main: everything in the rolling gate, plus longer integration tests, security scans, and install tests on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Every commit on main is tagged and released, with a signed build.

If a gate fails, nothing moves. The fix goes into dev and climbs again.

Your product does not have to use all three rungs. If your repository has only main, init maps it and renames nothing; add dev and rolling when you want them.

Why a ladder helps you

Speed and stability together. People who want the newest work take rolling. People who need calm take main. Nobody waits for everyone.
Every release is traceable. A tag points at one commit, built by one workflow, from one gate run.
Measurement starts on time. release schedules the Goal's measurement when the work goes out.

In the story: benefits-qa reached rolling as rolling-2026-10-12.4. Three days later, on 15 October 2026, main got the first stable release, v0.1.0, which is what your first hour installs.

The procedure, step by step, is in Contributing. Terms are defined in the glossary.

Under the hood: the gates, signatures, and provenance of each step are in releases and the supply chain.

What's next

You have the ideas. Now see them in motion: the journey at a glance.

Generated by aayu tell docs from docs/guide/concepts-ladder.md. Links to work items name only Features whose shipped stories all have authoritative proof packs. Agents: read this page as Markdown, or start from llms.txt.