maintainer-radar

Review Plans

Review plans turn a pull request queue into a time-boxed maintainer session.

Use this when the question is not “what is in the queue?” but “what should I do with the next 30 minutes?”

maintainer-radar repo owner/repo --hydrate --sort action --review-plan-minutes 30

The plan can be Markdown for a terminal, GitHub Actions run summary, issue, or maintainer handoff note. It can be HTML for a browser-friendly artifact, or JSON for dashboards and automation:

maintainer-radar repo owner/repo --hydrate --sort action --format html --review-plan-minutes 30
maintainer-radar repo owner/repo --hydrate --sort action --format json --review-plan-minutes 30

You can also try this without installing anything in the browser preview:

https://jackspiece.github.io/maintainer-radar/?repo=python/cpython

Scan a public repository, set the plan minutes, and use Copy Plan.

What The Plan Includes

• the time budget
• planned PRs that fit the budget
• estimated active maintainer time per PR
• next-step guidance for each planned PR
• deferred PRs that did not fit the budget
• watch-only PRs that are waiting for CI or author action
• draft follow-up comments for PRs that need author action, CI fixes, smaller scope, or a ready-for-review update

How Time Is Estimated

The estimate is deterministic and intentionally rough. It is meant to help maintainers budget attention, not predict exact review time.

• small review-now PRs usually count as 12 minutes
• docs-only review-now PRs count lower
• medium or larger reviewable PRs count higher
• review-with-caution PRs add extra inspection time
• quick unblock actions such as CI fix, author follow-up, or smaller-PR request count as 5 minutes
• wait-for-CI and wait-for-author PRs are listed as watch-only items

Draft Follow-ups

Review plans stay read-only. They do not post comments, label PRs, or contact authors. When a planned or deferred item needs author action, the plan includes a draft follow-up comment that a maintainer can edit before posting.

HTML review-plan artifacts include a Copy Draft button for each draft follow-up. This is meant for CI artifacts and local handoff files where the maintainer wants to copy the ask quickly, then edit it before posting.

JSON plans include the same text in draft_follow_up_comment for each entry, so handoff tools and dashboards can show the draft without scraping Markdown.

Scheduled Review Plan

Generate a workflow that puts the review plan in the run summary every weekday:

maintainer-radar init-action \
  --review-plan-minutes 30 \
  --group-by action \
  --path .github/workflows/maintainer-radar.yml

Or configure the reusable Action directly:

with:
  repository: ${{ github.repository }}
  format: markdown
  sort: action
  review-plan-minutes: "30"
  hydrate: "true"

Use Markdown output when you want the plan in the Actions run summary. Use HTML output when you want a downloadable browser-friendly plan artifact. Use JSON output when a later workflow or dashboard should consume the plan:

with:
  repository: ${{ github.repository }}
  format: html
  output: review-plan.html
  sort: action
  review-plan-minutes: "30"
  hydrate: "true"

with:
  repository: ${{ github.repository }}
  format: json
  output: review-plan.json
  sort: action
  review-plan-minutes: "30"
  hydrate: "true"

When the reusable Action runs with review-plan-minutes, it also exposes structured plan outputs for later workflow steps:

• planned-prs
• planned-minutes
• remaining-minutes
• deferred-prs
• watch-only-prs

For example:

- run: echo "${{ steps.radar.outputs.planned-prs }} PRs fit this review block"

Why This Is Different

AI reviewers inspect code after someone chooses a PR. Maintainer Radar helps choose where maintainer attention should go before that review starts. It stays read-only and does not approve, reject, merge, label, or comment on pull requests.

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