Proposed workflow uses three merge gates to catch flaky tests before they ship

A developer workflow published on DEV Community argues that a green CI check alone should not authorize a code merge. The proposed system requires three mechanical gates to pass first: a pre-push hook that rejects undeclared fixture files and unapproved test skips, function-scoped isolated directories to prevent tests from sharing or overwriting fixture data, and a visible flake budget that caps silent retries. The author warns that agent-generated tests frequently introduce risky patterns such as snapshot files, bare time.sleep calls, and ticket-less skips, making these gates necessary even when the author is human. The workflow is designed to run identically both locally and in GitHub Actions, so no single developer can bypass it by skipping local git configuration.