Developer builds CLI tool to sort Dependabot PRs, draws firm limits on automation
A software developer built an open-source CLI tool called dep-triage to automatically categorize open Dependabot pull requests on GitHub into five action buckets — including auto-merge, escalate, close, rebase, and skip — based on a policy file stored in the repository. The tool uses fully deterministic logic with no AI involvement, and dry-run mode is enabled by default to prevent unintended changes. A strict scope check ensures only PRs that exclusively modify dependency manifests or lockfiles are eligible for auto-merge, while any PR touching source code is automatically excluded. To guard against race conditions, the tool re-fetches the latest commit SHA and CI status immediately before applying any merge action, aborting if anything has changed since the initial triage. Testing against a real repository with 11 open PRs revealed edge cases that unit tests missed, including GitHub's combined-status API returning identical responses for both pending CI and absent CI checks.
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