Reviews that expire unread

Branch feat/coderabbit-harvest-stage, 2026-09-03. On Yonatan-HQ/platform, last 80 PRs measured 2026-09-02: CodeRabbit posted 65 threads on 24 PRs. 3 resolved, 4 outdated, and 23 of the 24 PRs merged with every thread still open. A hand-verified batch on 08-24 was 6 real out of 9, so the reviews were worth reading and nobody read them. The new create-pr phase makes reading them a gate.

1. The measured baseline

Measure	Value	What it means
PRs sampled	80	Yonatan-HQ/platform, newest first
PRs CodeRabbit reviewed	24	the rest had no threads
threads posted	65	one GraphQL read per PR sees them all
threads resolved	3	4 more went outdated on later pushes
reviewed PRs merged with open threads	23 of 24	no SDLC step read the review before merge
hand-verified findings that were real	6 of 9	08-24 batch; refuting is cheaper than ignoring

2. Walk a sample PR through the contract

Five threads as the harvest script prints them. For each, the refuter returns refuted: true or false. Survivors get a fix commit and a reply naming the sha; refuted ones get a one-line dismissal. Every thread is resolved either way. The phase ends only when the unresolved count is zero.

unresolved5

merge blocked

path:line	severity	title	refuter verdict	reply posted	state

bash "$H" "$PR" --unresolved | jq length 5

3. The severity and title parser

The script reads CodeRabbit's body format: the first line carries _category_ | _emoji Severity_ | _effort_, and the first bold line is the title. Paste any thread body and see what the jq filter extracts. Unknown severities do not fail the read; they print unknown and still count as unresolved.

4. Where the phase sits

checks green → harvest (1 GraphQL read, coderabbitai only) → refuter per thread, isolated Agent, never edits → survived: fix, commit, push, reply "Fixed in <sha>" → refuted: reply "Dismissed: <reason>" → --resolve every thread → --unresolved must print [] → gh pr merge / --auto

Termination. A fix push can trigger new threads. Those get exactly one more pass; anything left is replied Deferred to #<issue> with a filed issue and resolved, so the phase cannot loop. Skipped when the repo has no .coderabbit.yaml or the PR is still a draft. Read mode was exercised against a real PR with four threads; no real thread was replied to or resolved.