escalator

A small pipeline that spends strong-model effort only where a cheap model failed.

1. A local model drafts a patch for one task row, as SEARCH/REPLACE edit blocks applied in a throwaway git worktree.
2. Your gate command (tests) runs, and a diff rule check refuses protected paths and oversized diffs.
3. A cheap reviewer reads the diff and answers OK or REJECT: reason.
4. Failures are fed back to the draft model for a few tries. If it is still red, a stronger model fixes it once.
5. Only a green, reviewed result is committed, on a branch esc/<id>. Nothing is pushed or merged: you land it.

Task text is passed to every model as quoted data, not as instructions.

Install

Python 3.9+ and git. Put bin/ on your PATH (the scripts find lib/ next to them).

Configure

Copy escalator.example.json to escalator.json (or ~/.config/escalator/config.json, or set ESCALATOR_CONFIG). Each model is a "stage": either {"url": ".../v1", "model": "name", "api_key_env": "VAR"} for any OpenAI-compatible server, or {"cmd": "shell command"} that gets the prompt on stdin and prints the reply (the fix command runs inside the worktree and may edit files directly, like an agent CLI; $ESCALATOR_WORKTREE is set). Other keys: repo, base_branch, gate_cmd, protected globs, max_diff_lines, tries, rules.

The task file (tasks) is plain markdown or JSON, see tasks.example.md and tasks.example.json: an id column or key, the task text, optional files to edit (otherwise the file hitting most keywords is used), optional status (closed rows are skipped).

Example

escalate T1                       # one task: draft, gate, review, fix on red; prints a JSON result line
escalate-batch 3 --dry-run        # list the open tasks
escalate-batch 3 --limit 10       # run them 3 at a time (draft and review only; add --fix to allow the strong model)

escalate-batch records results.tsv in the log directory, skips finished tasks, and supports --shard k/n for several lanes.

Tests

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests runs the whole pipeline in a temporary repo with shell-command stub models.

License

Apache-2.0, see LICENSE and NOTICE.