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pr-gh-open

Why It Exists​

This skill was added to ~/.dotfiles in commit 9dfa72e8 ("chore: add new skills"), a 24-file batch that introduced a family of PR/docs/estimation skills together — pr-ado-open, pr-gh-code-review, pr-ado-code-review, ai-governance, jira-estimate, and microservice-docs all landed in the same commit, with pr-gh-open/SKILL.md arriving at its full 156-line size already, no incremental buildup visible in dotfiles history. It later lived in dotfiles until df4241d4 ("feat(skills): switch agent-skills to external cw skills marketplace") removed it — that commit's message states plainly that duplicate local copies of skills like chrome-*, react-*, and pr-* risked drifting from the now-canonical catesandrew/skills repo (this repo), so dotfiles dropped its local copy and wired in the cw@skills marketplace instead. In other words: this skill's real authorship happened in dotfiles, but its current home — and the copy this page describes — is this public repo, per that migration commit's explicit intent.

What It Does​

The skill runs a six-phase pipeline for opening a GitHub PR from the current branch. Phase 1 does pre-flight checks: confirms the working tree is clean (git status --short), identifies the active branch, and detects/confirms the base branch by checking for common integration branches (dev, develop, main, master) — always asking the user to confirm before proceeding, since merging into the wrong base can trigger unintended CI or deploy pipelines. Phase 2 extracts a ticket ID by pattern-matching [A-Z]+-[0-9]+ first against the branch name, then falling back to commit subjects in git log origin/<base>..HEAD, and separately summarizes commit subjects as raw material for a human-readable Changes section (explicitly not raw commit messages).

Phase 3 pushes the branch (git push -u origin <branch>), stopping to ask the user before force-pushing on a rejected non-fast-forward push. Phase 4 builds a structured PR body from a fixed template with four sections — Ticket(s), Changes, Tests, Notes — each with explicit population rules (e.g., "never write 'fixed bug' — name the component and behavior"; omit Ticket(s) if no tracker is configured; only include Notes for migration steps, feature flags, or deployment ordering). Phase 5 creates the PR via gh pr create with base, title, body, reviewers, labels, and draft flag, falling back to a CODEOWNERS lookup via gh api when no reviewers are specified. Phase 6 prints the PR URL and optionally applies an ai-assisted label if the session was AI-assisted.

How To Use It​

Triggers on: "open a PR", "create a pull request", "submit a PR" against a GitHub repository, needing the branch pushed and a PR created with a structured description, linked ticket, reviewers, and labels.

skills add -g catesandrew/skills --skill skills/pr-gh-open
npm install @catesworks/skill-pr-gh-open
/plugin marketplace add catesandrew/skills
/plugin install cw@skills

This last one installs all 52 skills as a single bundled plugin named cw — there is no standalone per-skill plugin.

Gotchas & Invariants​

  • Always confirm the base branch with the user before pushing — dev vs main can trigger different deployment pipelines.
  • Push only after the base branch is confirmed, never before.
  • Changes bullets must name the component and the behavior that changed — never vague text like "fixed bug" or "updated service."
  • Explicitly state in the Tests section if no tests were added or modified; don't just omit it silently.
  • Include the Notes section only when there are real migration steps, a feature flag, deployment ordering requirements, or known limitations — not by default.
  • Don't force-push on a rejected push without investigating and confirming with the user first.
  • Don't auto-assign reviewers without checking CODEOWNERS for the actual owners of the changed paths.
  • Use draft mode for branches that aren't ready for review, to prevent accidental merges.

Sourced from: skills/pr-gh-open/SKILL.md, skills/pr-gh-open/metadata.json, ~/.dotfiles git history (commits 9dfa72e8, df4241d4)