Hi all,
Two related things this morning, both as a starting point for discussion:
1. NEXT ROUND OF TRIAGE
=======================
I ran another full pass of the auto-triage skill against the open-PR
queue. The skill closed the obvious cases on its own (stale-triaged
drafts past the 7-day no-response window, a few rebase-able PRs whose
"failing CI" was actually stale-main pollution, etc.) and surfaced
contributor PRs into the "ready for maintainer review" label so we
don't have to keep re-discovering them.
The big picture after this round:
- 459 open PRs (non-bot), 342 from contributors, 187 currently
labelled "ready for maintainer review" (54% of the contributor
queue).
- The triage funnel is doing its job: only ~98 contributor non-draft
PRs are still untriaged, and only 1 is older than 4 weeks.
- The rest of the open queue is mostly drafts (where the author is
in control) and the growing review backlog.
What changed since last round: the queue of *bad* PRs (mergeable
conflicts not addressed, abandoned drafts, missing CI signals) is
mostly gone — those are now either auto-drafted, auto-closed via
stale-sweep, or rebased. What is *growing* is the backlog of PRs
that are ready and waiting for a human maintainer to actually
review the code.
2. PROTOTYPE TRIAGE DASHBOARD
=============================
To make the above legible at a glance, I asked my agent this morning
to build a maintainer dashboard on top of the same data the triage
skill already fetches. It took about an hour, end to end. This is
explicitly a first attempt — not a finished product.
Live (snapshot, dated):
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.githubusercontent.com/potiuk/ef446baff0fa2972951b5eb5a3826dcf/raw/pr-dashboard-v3.html
Source HTML (single self-contained page, no JS):
https://gist.github.com/potiuk/ef446baff0fa2972951b5eb5a3826dcf
What's currently on it:
- A health rating + four hero cards (queue size, ready count,
untriaged-non-drafts).
- A "What needs attention" panel — deterministic recommendations
derived from rules in the skill spec, each with the exact
slash-command to run for the action.
- Closure velocity for the last 6 weeks (per-week stacked bars).
- Opened-vs-closed momentum (line chart) — answers "is the backlog
growing or shrinking" (last 6 weeks: -56 PRs, shrinking).
- Ready-for-review trend by top-pressure areas (line chart, one line
per area) — surfaces where the review backlog is climbing fastest.
- Closed-by-triage-reason per week (stacked bars) — green = merged,
amber = author-engaged-then-closed, red = stale-sweep close,
grey = closed without ever being triaged.
- Pressure ranking by area (top 8) so the maintainer can pick a
focused 30-minute session.
- Triage-funnel coverage / response-rate metrics.
- Original per-area tables collapsed into "Detailed tables" at the
bottom for anyone who wants the raw numbers.
Opening discussion: what *else* should be on this dashboard so we
can use it day to day? What's missing, what's noise, what would you
look at first thing in the morning to know what to do?
3. WHAT MAINTAINERS NEED TO DO NOW
==================================
The dashboard already encodes my proposed answer for "what to do",
but in plain text:
- Look at the "What needs attention" panel. Each card is a concrete
slash-command (or pointer to one) that you can paste.
- For most maintainers right now, that's going to be
"/maintainer-review" filtered by an area:* label you care about
— which is also what the "Pressure by area" panel is sorted to
surface.
- The triage skill has handled the bottom of the queue. The top of
the queue (the 187 ready-for-review PRs) needs us, the humans.
If each of us picks an area we care about and runs a maintainer-review
session against just that area's "ready for maintainer review" PRs,
we move the queue down measurably and the dashboard reflects it on
the next snapshot.
4. FEEDBACK + PRS WELCOME
=========================
The dashboard skill is in the same place as the triage skill — both
are in the apache/airflow repo under .github/skills/, with mirrored
copies in apache/airflow-steward. PRs against either are welcome.
There's also a Slack channel for auto-triage feedback — the dashboard
recommendations and triage decisions are deterministic rules, so if
something feels wrong, it's a rule worth changing.
And — riffing on the "Intention is all you need" framing
( https://potiuk.com/intention-is-all-you-need-1379ec41a19c ) —
nothing about either the dashboard or the triage process is fixed
in stone. Both are agent-readable skills, which means the modification
loop is now: notice what you'd like different → describe the
intention to your agent → it edits the skill → propose the change
back as a PR. You don't need to file a feature request, wait for me
to find time, or write the rendering code yourself. If you'd like
the dashboard to show "PRs that *I* requested review on", or
"per-author response rate", or "Helm-chart age distribution" — tell
your agent and it will do it.
That applies to the triage process itself too. If a triage rule is
producing comments you don't like, or the wrong PRs are being
auto-drafted, the rules live in
.github/skills/pr-triage/classify-and-act.md and are about as
agent-modifiable as anything in this repo.
Looking forward to feedback — replies on this thread, Slack, or PR.
Cheers,
J.
