Nudge stale pull requests
Pull requests waiting too long get a polite reminder to the right reviewer.
Engineering · Software · On a schedule · Updated
Works with
- Slack
SlackHow do you remind reviewers about stale pull requests?
To remind reviewers about stale pull requests, set a Loop in Maito for each weekday morning. It finds pull requests waiting longer than your limit, checks who should review them, and posts a short reminder in the engineering channel. When a pull request is stuck on failing checks, it tells the author instead.
How it's done today
PRs sit for days and go stale.
What Maito does
- Find PRs waiting over a day
- Find who should review
- Send a reminder
Example
Loop run: Weekday 9:30 AM · Stale pull request nudge
Nudged reviewers on 4 pull requests this morning. • #892 Retry failed webhooks, waiting 2 days. Priya • #889 Move billing jobs to the queue, waiting 3 days. Tom • #887 Rename payment fields, waiting 2 days. Priya • #881 Coupon codes, waiting 1 day. Sam Not nudged: #885 (Marcus) has waited 4 days, but lint is failing, so I told Marcus instead. Catch: #887 asked Dev to review, but Dev hasn't touched payments code since August and isn't in CODEOWNERS for it. I reminded Priya, the current owner. From the open pull requests and CODEOWNERS.
@Maito #889 is still a draft, leave it alone.
Understood. I'll skip drafts from tomorrow, and I've withdrawn today's reminder to you.
Maito (9:30 AM):
Nudged reviewers on 4 pull requests this morning.
• #892 Retry failed webhooks, waiting 2 days. Priya
• #889 Move billing jobs to the queue, waiting 3 days. Tom
• #887 Rename payment fields, waiting 2 days. Priya
• #881 Coupon codes, waiting 1 day. Sam
Not nudged: #885 (Marcus) has waited 4 days, but lint is failing, so I told Marcus instead.
Catch: #887 asked Dev to review, but Dev hasn't touched payments code since August and isn't in CODEOWNERS for it. I reminded Priya, the current owner.
From the open pull requests and CODEOWNERS.
Tom (9:44 AM):
#889 is still a draft, leave it alone.
Maito (9:44 AM):
Understood. I'll skip drafts from tomorrow, and I've withdrawn today's reminder to you.
How to set it up
- Ask your agent
“Every weekday at 9:30, find pull requests that have waited more than a day for review and remind the reviewer in #eng. If a check is failing, tell the author instead.”
What it won't do
It sees review activity on the pull request, not conversations that happened elsewhere. A reviewer who already agreed to look in a call can still get a reminder.
Questions
The assigned reviewer, checked against code ownership. If the named reviewer does not own that code, it says so and reminds the owner.
No. A pull request with failing checks gets a note to its author, and drafts are skipped.
Yes. Tell Maito the limit in the Slack thread, such as one working day, and it uses that from then on.
