Triaging Open PRs for Mergeability

"Which of these can I merge right now?" is a filtering problem before it is a review problem. A repo with twenty open PRs has maybe three worth reading, and finding them by opening each one burns context on drafts and conflicts.

scripts/pr-triage.sh does the filtering. Its output is a filter, not a verdict — it tells you which PRs are worth your attention, never which are worth merging. That judgement is yours, and the rules below are where the real work happens.

Run the script

scripts/pr-triage.sh [-R owner/repo] [-l limit] [-a]

Defaults the repo from $PWD; -h prints usage. It emits the inventory of every open PR, then — for the non-draft, conflict-free shortlist only — each PR's non-passing checks and unresolved review threads (with who raised them and whether they are outdated), and finally the branch ruleset that explains why healthy PRs still say BLOCKED. Use -a to include drafts and conflicted PRs in the per-PR pass.

One run answers the mechanical half of the question. Read the survivors' diffs yourself.

What the script is doing, and why

Read this when adapting the script, debugging odd output, or working a surface it does not cover.

The inventory is one call — gh pr list requesting number, title, isDraft, mergeable, mergeStateStatus, additions, deletions and changedFiles, rendered through column -t. --limit defaults low in gh itself, so the script passes 100; without it PRs silently vanish and you triage a subset believing it is the whole set.

Checks report only what is not passing, so a clean PR costs one line instead of twenty. skipping is excluded alongside pass: deploy-gated jobs sit permanently skipped on PRs and are not failures. Never reach for gh pr checks --watch here — on repos with permanently-skipping checks it never exits. Poll snapshots instead.

Unresolved threads need GraphQL. Only reviewThreads exposes isResolved; the REST review-comments endpoint carries no resolution state at all. To act on those threads rather than count them, use the pr-comment-resolving skill.

The ruleset is queried once, not per PR. It is a property of the branch, and the blocker is normally identical across every PR. Note that gh api repos/OWNER/REPO/branches/main/protection often reports "Branch not protected" while a ruleset is actively enforcing — rulesets and legacy branch protection are separate APIs, so a negative answer there proves nothing.

Reading mergeStateStatus

Status	Meaning
BLOCKED	Usually just "needs an approving review" — not a fault
DIRTY	Real merge conflicts with the base branch
UNKNOWN	GitHub is still computing mergeability, typically after another PR merged; re-poll in ~20s rather than reporting it
CLEAN	Nothing outstanding

Treating BLOCKED as a problem is the most common triage error. It is the normal resting state for a PR under a ruleset requiring approvals, which is why the script keeps those PRs on the shortlist.

Judgement, not just green lights

The script cannot decide any of this.

Bot reviews are COMMENTED, never APPROVED. A PR carrying a dozen CodeRabbit or Copilot reviews still satisfies zero of a required-approval rule. Do not read review volume as review coverage.

A red e2e or deploy check is frequently infrastructure, not the code. Before reporting a failure, check whether the same check passes on the base branch and on sibling PRs, and whether the PR even touches the failing package. Deploy-gated e2e jobs fail when the preview deploy fails, so one root cause commonly shows up as two red checks.

Green CI plus no unresolved threads is not the same as reviewed. This distinction is the single most useful thing in the report: state plainly which PRs you have read and which you have only measured.

Read the diff before recommending a merge. Mechanical green is a filter, not a verdict. A PR can pass every automated check while its changeset asserts something factually false about the product, or fixes two of the three code paths it claims to fix.

Check for overlapping files across the shortlist and derive a merge order from it:

gh pr view "$N" --json files --jq '.files[].path'

Whichever PR merges second will need a rebase; say so explicitly.

Report format

Two tables and a merge order:

1. Mergeable shortlist — PR number, size, a one-line description of what the change actually does, and any caveat.
2. Everything excluded — each with its one specific blocker: 1 unresolved thread from @X, unanswered since 2026-07-28; coveralls failing; draft. Never a vague "not ready" — a blocker the user cannot act on is not worth printing.

Then the suggested merge order with its reason, which is normally shared files. Keep the reviewed/measured distinction visible in the shortlist table rather than burying it in prose.

Gotchas

• Piping gh output through head truncates mid-JSON and breaks any following jq. Write the full output to a file with tee and analyse the file (see the slow-command-running skill).
• Under zsh with noclobber, > silently fails when the target file exists, so a stale file gets analysed and the results look plausible. The script uses mktemp for exactly this reason; do the same in any ad-hoc command you add.