---
name: "Merge pipeline cherry-pick fails with bad revision on merge-queue branch"
---

## Rejection Notes

**2026-03-16:** Previous coder (coder-opus) produced zero code changes. The feature branch had no diff against master. Actually fix the bug this time.

# Bug 250: Merge pipeline cherry-pick fails with bad revision on merge-queue branch

## Description

The mergemaster merge pipeline consistently fails at the cherry-pick step with: fatal: bad revision merge-queue/{story_id}. The merge-queue branch is created and the squash commit succeeds, but the branch reference is not accessible during the subsequent cherry-pick onto master. This affects every story that reaches the merge stage — no stories can be automatically merged. The issue is in the git reference handling within the merge pipeline, not a code conflict.

## How to Reproduce

1. Have a completed story in 4_merge/ with a feature branch containing commits ahead of master
2. Trigger merge_agent_work via MCP or let the mergemaster agent run
3. Observe the cherry-pick failure

## Actual Result

Cherry-pick fails with fatal: bad revision merge-queue/{story_id}. The merge-queue branch was created and squash commit succeeded, but the branch reference is not found during cherry-pick. Master is untouched.

## Expected Result

The merge pipeline should successfully squash-merge the feature branch into master, run quality gates, move the story to done, and clean up the worktree and branch.

## Acceptance Criteria

- [ ] Use git bisect or git log to find when the merge pipeline broke
- [ ] Fix the root cause — do not layer on a workaround
- [ ] Merge pipeline successfully merges a story from 4_merge to master end-to-end
- [ ] Quality gates run and pass before the merge commits to master
