Bots that decide whether to trust a new contributor's pull request #89

A stranger's pull request lands, and the question underneath "is this good code" is a quieter one: who is this, and what do they usually do. A maintainer can pull up their commit history, their other repos, how long the account has existed, but turning that into a decision takes judgement most people don't have time to apply consistently, and the newest contributors are exactly the ones most likely to get skipped or rubber-stamped on vibes.

What a gitbot adds here splits in two. Compiling the signals, account age, prior merged work elsewhere, how their past PRs were received, has a right answer: the facts are public and checkable. Turning that into "trust this enough to review it closely" or "trust this enough to merge it fast" is the part that needs to be handed to a maintainer as a call with its reasoning attached, not a score they have to interpret themselves.

We'd take one per platform or community: GitHub, GitLab, a package registry handing someone publish access, a forum promoting a first-time poster to moderator. The signals differ; the shape of the decision doesn't.

New here? gitbot runs Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode as reusable bots on your own machine, with your logins and your files. You define a bot once, a name and a job in plain English, and run it in as many folders as you like.

npm install -g @gitbot-hq/gitbot
gitbot start

Built one for this? Finished bots go into this library, each listed under the GitHub account that built it. In GitBot, the share menu on a bot has a Publish to Marketplace option that opens the pull request to add it. Your instructions go in as written.

These stay open after the first bot lands. And yours doesn't need to be general: people install the bot that's built for the stack they're already on.