- Published on
Running Claude Code as an autonomous agent inside a GitHub-centric SDLC rests on one discipline: GitHub is the system of record, the agent's conversation is ephemeral, and everything that must survive across pull requests lives in repo files or GitHub itself. This post walks the full issue-to-merge loop — trigger modes, the Explore→Plan→Implement→Commit cycle, cross-session context persistence via CLAUDE.md, the four distinct automated-review surfaces, and the merge gates that keep an agent that literally cannot self-approve from ever merging by fiat. It is built from a fact-checked research pass (25 claims verified, 0 refuted, overwhelmingly first-party Anthropic sources) and is deliberate about separating verified mechanics from the viral stats that did not survive verification.