Epic: Phase 3 Release Workflow and Quality Gates

[keepithandy]

Phase

Phase 3 — Developer Experience

Goal

Create a practical release and quality workflow for Depth Engine so future milestones can be shipped confidently.

This epic improves how changes move from idea to issue to pull request to merged checkpoint.

Why this matters

Depth Engine is growing from a prototype into a reusable starter. The bigger the roadmap gets, the more useful a clear release ritual becomes: what changed, what was tested, what did not change, and what should happen next.

Proposed work

• Define a lightweight milestone naming pattern.
• Add a pull request checklist for direct startup, Rat Cellar playability, smoke tests, docs, and boundary rules.
• Add a release notes template.
• Add a current checkpoint note that records the latest stable commit.
• Document how to choose between docs-only, smoke-only, and runtime changes.
• Add a guide for keeping one clean milestone commit when appropriate.
• Consider issue templates for epic, patch, docs, smoke, and bug reports.

Acceptance checks

• Contributors have a clear pull request checklist.
• Release notes have a repeatable shape.
• Latest stable checkpoint is easy to find.
• Scope boundaries are explicit in pull requests.
• Existing smoke commands are listed in one obvious place.
• No heavy CI dependency is required for this issue.

Guardrails

• Do not add complicated automation yet.
• Do not require GitHub Actions unless separately planned.
• Do not make releases feel enterprise-heavy.
• Keep the workflow useful for a solo developer on a small repo.

Suggested follow-up slices

• Pull request checklist doc.
• Issue templates.
• Release note template.
• Stable checkpoint notes file.
• Optional CI planning issue later.