> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.enagrams.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Test Gate

> The affected-test check that runs before a change lands

## Why

"I'm done" is the riskiest signal in multi-agent coding. The test gate turns it from a self-report into a verifiable receipt: your change doesn't propagate to teammates until the tests that depend on the symbols you touched actually pass.

## The Flow

<Steps>
  <Step title="Discover">
    Call [`confirm_ready`](/mcp/confirm-ready) with `touched_files` (and optionally `touched_symbols`). The gate walks the [symbol graph](/concepts/symbol-graph) backwards from your changes to the test files that transitively depend on them and returns `affected_tests`.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Run">
    Your agent runs exactly those tests locally. No point running the full suite if only three tests are affected.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Submit">
    Call `confirm_ready` again with `test_results[]`. The gate evaluates pass/fail per test, correlates failures against your machine's flake history (`machine_id`), and returns a verdict.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Receipt">
    On pass the gate writes a `sync_log` row. Pass its `sync_log_id` to [`sync_commit`](/mcp/sync-commit) when you push — the auto-sync watcher uses gated receipts to decide which commits to fan out to other machines.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Flake Handling

The gate tracks per-machine pass/fail history per test. Flaky tests (intermittent failures on the same machine + commit) are surfaced as `failures[].flake=true`. Repeated failures across machines are treated as real and block the gate.

## Completing a Task Atomically

If the change-set satisfies a delegated task, pass `completes_task_id` to `confirm_ready`. On gate pass the task is marked `done` in the same transaction, which triggers the unblock cascade for any tasks that depended on it.

## When the Gate Isn't Enough

The gate checks "the tests I decided to run passed on my machine". It does not replace CI. Keep CI for:

* Full-matrix runs (OS × node version × env)
* Integration tests against real external services
* Static analysis (linting, typechecks) that gates merge, not handoff

The gate's job is to prevent breaking handoffs inside a workstream. CI's job is to prevent merging to `main` broken.