Patterns
Pattern: pr-babysitter
Open pull requests rot quietly — a conflict appears, CI goes red, a reviewer goes silent — and nobody notices until someone asks "what happened to that…
Open pull requests rot quietly — a conflict appears, CI goes red, a reviewer goes silent — and nobody notices until someone asks "what happened to that PR?" This kit checks in every ten minutes during business hours and surfaces exactly what changed since the last look, ranked by how much it needs a human. It comments on nothing and merges nothing; a wrong read here costs a re-read, never an unrecallable action on shared history.
Quick facts
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Category | B · PR & review |
| Heartbeat | schedule |
| Cadence | 5–15m |
| Level | L1 (report-only) |
| Cost | High |
| Group | A — course-native |
The six parts
| Part | This kit |
|---|---|
| Heartbeat | schedule — every 10 minutes, business hours |
| Body | reads every open PR's review state, CI status, mergeability, and staleness via the SCM CLI; writes only pr-status-report.md, its own state file, and the run log |
| Spine | pr-babysitter-state.md — per-PR last-seen status, so a beat reports only what changed |
| Stopping condition | per-beat: pr-status-report.md written, ranked, template-matched — this kit never "finishes" while PRs exist |
| Checker | loop-verifier (read-only) — grades report format; this kit is itself the reconciliation sweep for anything an event-driven reviewer might miss |
| Human gate | you read the report and decide what to act on; nothing acts until you do |
The three valid stops
- Success — each beat:
pr-status-report.mdexists, ranked, template-matched, and per-PR marks are updated. - Limit — 60 runs/day or 350k tokens/day.
- No progress — no status change across all open PRs for 3 consecutive beats → log and stop.
Source: Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1), Step 7 — Event-Driven Loops (the PR-review / reconciliation-sweep case study) and Part V §15B's catalog entry. Full attribution: resources/sources.md.