Vibe Maintainer: Managing the AI PR Storm

Scale

• ~50 contributor PRs per day across Beads (20k stars) and Gas Town (13k stars)
• 1,000+ unique contributors; 4,000+ total PRs
• Median time to resolution: 15 hours
• ~88% merge rate
• 15-20 hours/week human oversight

PR Sheriff Decision Tree

• Easy Wins: Bug fixes, docs, dependency updates — automatic every 2 hours
• Merge-fix: Merge as-is, push follow-up fix to main
• Fix-merge: Pull locally, fix, push with contributor attribution
• Cherry-pick: Take only useful parts of multi-part PR
• Split-merge: Separate large PR into distinct concerns
• Redesign: Reject code but implement idea better
• Reject/Retire: Niche features, high tech debt, obsolete PRs

“Requesting changes is the last resort because it quickly leads to contributor starvation.”

PR Hygiene Rules

• Cross-project pollution: Keep project boundaries strict
• Zero Framework Cognition (ZFC): Build resilient apps without heavy framework dependencies
• Use Plugins: Keep core minimal
• One concern per PR
• Always rebase before submission

Future

• Dark Factories: Coding agents as SREs and production workers
• SaaS-Eater: AI-driven de-SaaS-ing
• Gas City: Dark Factory Factory replacing binary with declarative “packs”