/community-sweep

name: community-sweep
description: Land community pull requests as the contributor and answer community issues on thedotmack/claude-mem. Takes stock of every open PR (the owner's own included, except the ones the owner marked experimental) and community issue, triages each against the owner's merge philosophy and the cmem.ai hosted-service boundary, finishes somewhat-aligned PRs on the contributor's own branch, squash-merges so the contributor stays the commit author on main, thanks them by name, closes fixed issues with credit to reporter and fixer, keeps the private ledger and contributor roster current, and reports what it decided. Use when asked to "go through the PRs", "merge contributor PRs", "help contributors with their PRs", "land the new community PRs", "triage new issues and PRs", "run the community sweep", "keep the momentum", or "grow the community".

Community Sweep

Grow the claude-mem community by merging people in. Every valuable contribution lands **as the contributor**: their PR, their name as the commit author on `main`. A PR that is only partly right gets finished on their branch instead of rejected. Issues get the same treatment, so the person who reported a bug and the person who fixed it both hear about it, by name.

This is the protocol from the 2026-09-30 open-PR merge sweep, which took 257 open PRs to 46 and merged 143 contributor PRs from 87 authors with their authorship intact. It is written down so every new batch of PRs and issues gets handled the same way.

The owner's merge philosophy

1. **Merge as many valuable contributions as possible.** This is looser than the Merge Clinic (#3372, `docs/merge-rubric.md`). Opt-in features are welcome, as are extensibility (providers, hosts, hooks, settings knobs) and anything that cuts token spend (bounding, batching, dedup, filtering). 2. **Finish, don't reject.** If the intent is right but the fix is partial or buggy, finish it on the contributor's branch, or land only its additive piece (a trim). Either way the credit stays with them. 3. **No band-aids, but no bleeding.** A fix walks the issue down to its root cause. A band-aid that stops active user harm ships only with a written post-plan: the root-cause follow-up, specified well enough to execute. 4. **The contributor is the author.** A merge that puts the maintainer's name on someone else's work is a failed merge. 5. **Respect the hosted-service boundary** (step 2). A PR may not change how cmem.ai cloud sync or the gateway's sign-in and trial path behave. You decide: trim or rework that part out and land the rest, or decline it with the reason. 6. **Security and privacy regressions block a merge.** That covers secrets in logs, data sent to third parties, and injection. 7. **Critical bug fixes ship now.** A PR that fixes a break users are hitting goes out right away, so nobody's service stays interrupted: sign-in or activation that errors, a worker that won't start, hooks that fail, capture or search that stops working, data loss. It lands first in the run and a patch release follows (step 3). It never waits for the owner, including when the broken path is cmem.ai sign-in, sync or the gateway. The boundary in step 2 covers changes to how those paths behave, not fixes that make them work again. On 2026-11-07 the owner was wrongly asked about #5455, which fixed Pro sign-in returning 500 on every install. 8. **Nothing needs the owner.** The owner set this on 2026-11-07. Every PR and issue in a sweep gets decided and carried through by you: merge, close, release, X post. The report says what you decided and why. It never asks the owner a question or lists decisions for them.

Count humans, not tools. A PR written with Claude, Codex, Cursor or Copilot is credited to the human who opened it. Bot PRs (PostHog, Copilot agent, Dependabot) land on merit, but they never go on the roster.

Private state: never commit, never upload

Run state lives in the main checkout's gitignored `.scratch/`, so every worktree shares it:

MAIN_CHECKOUT="$(cd "$(git rev-parse --git-common-dir)/.." && pwd)"
STATE="$MAIN_CHECKOUT/.scratch/community"
RUN_ID="CS-$(date -u +%F)"; RUN="$STATE/runs/$RUN_ID"; mkdir -p "$RUN"

| File | What it is | |---|---| | `$STATE/ledger.tsv` | One row per outcome. The last row for a number wins. It is the source of truth for what already happened; never redo a number it shows as done. | | `$STATE/ROSTER.md` | Every human with a merged PR or a co-author credit, kept for the owner's outreach. It holds emails, so never commit it, upload it, or quote it. | | `$RUN/` | This run's snapshots, triage reports, test baseline and `REPORT.md`. |

To append a ledger row (tab-separated; PR and issue numbers share one namespace):

printf '%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n' "$(date -u +%FT%TZ)" <number> "$RUN_ID" <action> <merge_sha|-> <author> <coauthors|-> "<one-line note>" >> "$STATE/ledger.tsv"

• **Actions for PRs:** `merged`, `closed`, `blocked`, `skipped`; for the owner's PRs, also `experimental`, and `approved`, which the owner writes to take a PR out of experimental. Older runs also wrote `held`, and `approved` for owner sign-offs.
• **Actions for issues:** `issue-closed`, `issue-answered`, `issue-routed`. Older runs also wrote `issue-held`.
• **New ledger:** if `ledger.tsv` doesn't exist, create it with the header `ts pr phase action merge_sha pr_author coauthors note` (tab-separated).

1. Take stock

gh pr list --repo thedotmack/claude-mem --state open --limit 500 --json number,title,author,isDraft,createdAt,updatedAt,mergeable,mergeStateStatus,maintainerCanModify,headRefName,headRepositoryOwner,baseRefName,additions,deletions > "$RUN/open-prs.json"
gh issue list --repo thedotmack/claude-mem --state open --limit 500 --json number,title,author,createdAt,updatedAt,labels,comments > "$RUN/open-issues.json"

Put every open PR in exactly one bucket, using its last ledger row. Use the first bucket that matches:

| Buck