Agent skill · software engineering · paperclipai
pr-gardening
Discover the pull requests this Paperclip instance opened (never community contributions), report what each is for and how confident we are that it is merge-ready, and automatically drive the non-ready ones back to green with /prepare-paperclip-pr — without ever merging.
Why this skill is useful
Adds executable scripts for automated pull request management that are not available in public documentation.
What it needs
Requires node installed locally. Requires github account access. About 7k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 75,771 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
PR Gardening Actively garden the pull requests this Paperclip instance opened that are referenced by Paperclip issues active in a recent window (default 14 days). Candidate discovery and readiness checking are scripts, not LLM analysis. GitHub access is read-only throughout this workflow. Scope — Our PRs Only By default the workflow gardens only pull requests authored by this instance's GitHub identity (the gh authenticated login, e.g. cryppadotta). Community contributions and dependabot PRs are excluded mechanically by author login in Stage A and land in droppedCommunityPullRequests; never re-add them by hand, widen the scope only when the caller explicitly passes --authors or --include-community. Hard Guardrails Never merge, approve, or close a pull request. Never instruct another person or agent to merge, approve, or close a pull request. Never garden, comment on, or run /prepare-paperclip-pr against a community PR. Only PRs from the Stage A author allowlist are actionable. Never use mutating gh commands or mutating GitHub API requests. The scripts only use gh pr view and read-only gh api GET requests. Draft pull requests are report-only. Do not post gardening comments for drafts. Comment only on existing originating issues. Never create a gardening issue per pull request. --dry-run suppresses all Paperclip mutations, including gardening comments, prepare tasks, and inbox archives. Discovery and GitHub inspection remain read-only in every mode. Inputs --days <N>: activity window, default 14. Applies to both mentioning-issue activity and the PR's own updatedAt; open PRs with no activity inside the window are dropped as stale. --authors <logins>: comma-separated GitHub logins whose PRs are in scope; default is the gh authenticated user. --include-community: disable the author filter entirely. Only on explicit caller request. --repo <owner/repo>: GitHub repository, default detected by gh repo view. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills paperclipai/pr-gardening