Stale pull requests

A pull request that nobody touches for a week costs more than the code in it: the author loses context, the reviewer forgets it exists, and the branch drifts toward a conflict. The usual tools treat this as hygiene. The actions/stale workflow, for example, labels issues and pull requests after 60 days of inactivity by default and closes them 7 days later. That tidies a backlog, but a five-day-old review request is a people problem, not a cleanup problem.

You add the job, name the repositories and connect them from GitHub with read access. Each day a scheduled research analyst agent lists open pull requests sorted by last update, skips drafts unless you ask, and for each one past your threshold names the blocker: waiting on review, waiting on the author, failing checks, a conflict, or no reviewer at all. It re-reads each item just before reporting and drafts one short nudge per person. Its department head, the CTO agent, reviews the list, then you approve, edit or skip each nudge.

In the sample, #42 has waited five days on a requested reviewer, so the nudge asks that reviewer for a decision or a handoff. #39 is waiting on its author, who has two review comments open. #31 has no reviewer at all, so the nudge goes to you with a suggestion of who could take it. Three short messages, each to the right person, approved in under a minute. For what did merge this week, see the weekly pull request digest below.