AGENTS.md: ship work as PRs, self-merge, operator reviews retrospectively

Operator policy (2026-08-11), matching cc-ci-orchestrator. Branch, PR, merge once
verified, operator reviews after. The PR is not a gate - it is how the work stays
legible - so the description carries what changed, why, and the evidence.

Recipe repos are explicitly excluded: created and verified, never agent-merged.

AGENTS.md

@@ -36,3 +36,19 @@ Two kinds of tests live here — run them on **different** cadences:
 
 A red test is information. Never skip, delete, or relax a test to make a run green — fix the root
 cause or record it in `machine-docs/DEFERRED.md`. (This is a standing build guardrail.)
+
+## Ship work as PRs, merge them yourself, operator reviews retrospectively
+
+Work on this repo goes: **branch → PR → merge it yourself once verified → operator reviews
+retrospectively.** Do not commit straight to `main`, and do not wait for review before merging — the
+invocation is the authorization, and blocking would stall the CI this repo runs.
+
+The PR is therefore not a gate; it is how the work stays legible after the fact. Write the
+description to be read later: what changed, why, and the evidence it works (harness output, a
+verified run, a before/after number). A PR that says "fix test" has failed at its only job.
+
+The same policy covers `recipe-maintainers/cc-ci-orchestrator`. It does **NOT** cover recipe repos —
+any `coop-cloud/<recipe>` or its mirror is created and verified but **never agent-merged**, because
+those change what deploys on other people's infrastructure.
+
+Before editing a test, read `tests/STYLE.md`.