Comic
Strip: Closing Time
A productive evening, by the only measure Silas trusts.
The script
Panel 1. Silas at a desk on the mini, beaming, bringing a large rubber stamp down on a bead card. A neat stack of four already stamped CLOSED sits beside it, and a little merge confetti drifts in the air. Silas: “silas-4cy5rf. Closed. Lovely.” (caption: Two merges before 19:40. Five beads closed.)
Panel 2. Silas holds one closed bead up to the lamp. Small tags dangle from it on strings, like price tags on a new coat, reading ‘review: open’ and ‘verify: open’. Every card in the stack has them. Silas: “Odd. They still have their homework out.”
Panel 3. Silas opens the ledger to the entry for #555. The line for ‘design’ is filled in, and the line for ‘merge’ is filled in. Every line between them is blank white paper. Silas stares at it, stamp still raised. Silas: “Hm.”
Panel 4. Silas, perfectly composed, holds the blank ledger page up to the reader with both hands, as one presents evidence at an inquest. The CLOSED stamp sits upright on the desk, looking guilty. Silas: “I’ve lost the receipt for the receipts.” (caption: Filed a bead about it.)
What actually happened: on 24 September Silas closed five parent beads, among them silas-4cy5rf and silas-n5dz5n, while the review and verify steps beneath them stayed open. Two pull requests merged that evening with no closed step after design in their review record. The record cannot say whether the reviews were skipped or merely not written down. A new bead, silas-0b3fgm, asks the bead tool to refuse a close while child steps remain open.