PR management skill family

September 13, 2026 · View on GitHub

Scope. Works on any project, ASF or not — no Apache-Software-Foundation-specific assumptions baked in.

Maintainer-facing PR-queue management for projects with a public contributor PR queue. Eight skills that compose into a complete triage + review + mentoring + hygiene pass:

  1. Agentic Triage — sweep open PRs, classify against the project's quality criteria, propose a disposition (draft / comment / close / rebase / rerun / mark ready / ping), execute on maintainer confirmation.
  2. Stats — read-only summary tables of the open PR backlog, grouped by area label, so the maintainer can see where queue pressure is sitting before / after a triage sweep.
  3. Code review — deep, line-aware code review one PR at a time. Reads the diff, applies the project's review criteria, drafts an APPROVE / REQUEST_CHANGES / COMMENT review with inline comments, posts on confirmation.
  4. Quick-merge — express-lane screener for trivial, low-risk PRs (docs, changelog, translations, tests) that pass every quality gate; surfaces ranked candidates with diff summaries and the exact merge command for the maintainer to run. Never merges itself — automated merge is the framework's deliberately-deferred Agentic Autonomous mode.
  5. Mentor — joins a PR (or issue) thread in a teaching register: clarifying questions, pointers to project conventions and docs, an explanation of why a change is being asked for. Waits for explicit maintainer confirmation before posting; never gatekeeps. Lives in the Mentoring mode but operates on the same PR surface as skills 1–4.
  6. Stale-sweep — identify open PRs past a configurable inactivity threshold, classify as NUDGE or CLOSE-STALE, post one comment per PR on maintainer confirmation.
  7. Pre-first-PR check — pre-flight a contributor's first PR against project conventions before it reaches a human reviewer; surfaces formatting, test, and documentation gaps.
  8. Reviewer routing — suggest the best-fit reviewer(s) for a new PR based on path ownership, recent review history, and current load.

Why a framework skill family? These skills were originally maintained inside one ASF project's developer-tooling repo as breeze pr auto-triage and breeze pr stats — useful for any ASF project with a meaningful contributor-PR queue, but locked behind that project's local toolchain. Lifting them into the framework lets other adopters reuse the playbook with their own adopter-config files for project-specific knobs (committers team handle, area-label prefix, comment-template wording, CI-check → doc-URL map, review-criteria source files).

Tip

Why this family

  • A maintainer's review queue, sorted by what actually needs you today
  • Deep, sequential review of one PR at a time, with the draft review shown before it is posted
  • Nothing is posted, merged or closed without your explicit confirmation on that PR

Install & first runs

Install just this family — one plugin, 8 skills. Maintainer-facing PR-queue management.

Once you have added the marketplace:

/plugin install magpie-pr-management@apache-magpie

New to Magpie? The quick start walks the whole path in one place — install, the first /magpie-setup run, and a recording of it happening — plus the other agents and the secure-isolation setup to run next.

Before the first run

An animated /magpie-setup config run for the pr-management family: the check failing, the values derived from the repository, one question for the rest, and gitignored files written

Illustrative — the real run derives more and asks better. What is true is the shape: it runs itself, it writes only gitignored files, and it stages nothing.

Every skill here resolves project-specific values from the adopter's <project-config>/ directory — which is .apache-magpie-local/ (gitignored, yours) first, then .apache-magpie-overrides/ (committed, the project's).

For yourself: /magpie-setup config scaffolds and fills these locally. Nothing is staged, nothing is committed, and it works on a repository that has never adopted Magpie.

For the project: /magpie-setup adopt commits them for every contributor, either scaffolded directly or promoted from what you configured locally.

Required. Without these a skill would act on a guess, so it stops and says which file is missing.

FileWhat it carriesRead by
pr-management-code-review-criteria.mdList of project's review-criteria source files (repo-wide AGENTS.md, code-review docs, per-area AGENTS.md), security-model calibration doc, backport-branch pattern, section-anchor URLs.code-review
pr-management-config.mdCommitters team handle, area-label prefix, project-specific labels (ready for maintainer review, etc.), grace windows.quick-merge, stale-sweep, stats, triage
pr-management-quick-merge-config.mdThresholds, path globs, and the merge-command template for the express lane.quick-merge
pr-management-triage-comment-templates.mdComment-body URLs (PR quality criteria, two-stage triage rationale), AI-attribution footer wording, project display name.triage
project.mdProject manifest. Identity, repositories, mailing lists, tools enabled, CVE tooling, GitHub project-board + issue-template field declarations. The single file every skill reads to resolve project-scoped references.code-review, mentor, quick-merge, reviewer-routing, stale-sweep, triage
reviewer-roster.mdWho reviews what.reviewer-routing

Optional. Each has a documented fallback; absent, the skill still runs.

FileWhat it carriesRead by
mentoring-config.mdTone knobs and hand-off protocol for the thread-level mentoring skill.mentor
pr-management-triage-ci-check-map.mdCI-check name pattern → category name + doc-URL mapping for the violations comment.triage
privacy-llm.mdWhich model tier may see which class of content, for projects routing foundation-private information away from third-party models.reviewer-routing
release-trains.mdActive release branches, release-manager attribution per cut, rotation rosters, security-team roster.code-review, reviewer-routing
stale-sweep-config.mdGrace windows and exemption labels for stale sweeps. Absent, the framework defaults apply.stale-sweep

Works well with

Third-party packages, none of them required: this family works with none of them installed, and Magpie neither bundles nor depends on any. They are named because they are what a maintainer goes looking for next, and because the answer differs by agent.

Code Review — Anthropic

Automated pull-request review through several specialised agents, scored by confidence.

With this family: pr-management-code-review walks a maintainer through reviewing one PR at a time and drafts the review they post. This is the other half — a broad automated pass whose findings that review can weigh.

Available on Claude Code only.

Install commands per agent are in Companion skill packages.

Try these first

Illustrative shapes, not real transcripts — your output will differ. Nothing below sends, merges, or posts anything without you confirming it.

Review a PR in depth.

> review PR #5193

  PR #5193  'Add retry to the S3 client'  +212 -18, 6 files
  2 blocking:   retry loop swallows KeyboardInterrupt (client.py:88)
                no test for the exhausted-retries path
  3 non-blocking nits. Review comment drafted, not posted.

Triage the whole queue.

/magpie-pr-management:triage

A triage run proposing one action each for four PRs — mark ready, ask if still active, ask for a rebase, promote out of draft — each needing confirmation

See where the queue is stuck.

/magpie-pr-management:stats

A stats run: a FAIR health rating, this week's and last week's open/close counts, the three areas under most pressure, and the triage funnel

Skills

SkillPurpose
pr-management-triageFirst-pass triage. Successor to breeze pr auto-triage.
pr-management-statsRead-only summary tables grouped by area label.
pr-management-code-reviewDeep code review, one PR at a time.
pr-management-quick-mergeExpress-lane screener for trivial, low-risk PRs in the ready for maintainer review queue; surfaces ranked candidates with diff summaries and the exact merge command. Read-only on the queue; the one optional mutation (APPROVE) requires explicit per-PR confirmation.
pr-management-mentorDraft a teaching-register comment on a single GitHub issue or PR thread (clarifying questions, project-convention pointers, rationale explanations); waits for explicit maintainer confirmation before posting. mode: Mentoring — see also docs/mentoring/README.md.
pr-stale-sweepSweep open PRs for inactivity past a configurable threshold; classify as NUDGE or CLOSE-STALE and post one comment per PR on confirmation.
pre-first-pr-checkPre-flight a contributor's first PR against project conventions before it reaches a human reviewer.
reviewer-routingSuggest the best-fit reviewer(s) for a new PR based on path ownership, recent review history, and current load.

Cross-references