PR management skill family

July 15, 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).

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.

Adopter contract

The skills resolve project-specific content from these files in the adopter's <project-config>/ directory:

FileUsed by
pr-management-config.mdpr-management-triage, pr-management-stats, pr-management-quick-merge (Real-CI patterns)
pr-management-triage-comment-templates.mdpr-management-triage
pr-management-triage-ci-check-map.mdpr-management-triage
pr-management-code-review-criteria.mdpr-management-code-review
pr-management-quick-merge-config.mdpr-management-quick-merge (thresholds, path globs, merge-command template)
mentoring-config.mdpr-management-mentor (tone knobs, hand-off protocol)

The skills read project-specific defaults from the <project-config>/ files above. Adopters customise by editing their copy of each template; illustrative examples in skill prose may still use the patterns that motivated the framework (monorepo <area>/ layout, area:* labels, etc.) — the behaviour is config-driven, the example wording is not.

Cross-references