{"slug": "show-hn-four-questions-to-stop-ai-gen-prs-from-ddosing-your-github-repository", "title": "Show HN: Four Questions to stop AI-gen PRs from DDoSing your GitHub repository", "summary": "A maintainer released agent-pr-gate, a CONTRIBUTING.md snippet that asks AI coding agents four questions before they open pull requests, after one account opened 58 PRs in 10 days on the benchmark-radar repository and only five were merged. The guide, published under CC0 1.0, instructs agents to wait for a human answer and adds a separate open-item limit, though the maintainer states results after adopting the gate have not yet been measured and it is not an enforced PR blocker.", "body_md": "**DDoS us with PRs? Your own agent has questions to DDoS you first.**\n\nOne account. **58 PRs in 10 days. Five merged.** That's what landed in\n[benchmark-radar's review queue](https://github.com/ktwu01/benchmark-radar/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#a-real-example-of-a-flood).\n\nSo we put four questions in `CONTRIBUTING.md`. Before an AI agent writes a PR,\nit has to stop and ask its human what they're actually trying to achieve.\n**The agent can't answer for them. It has to wait.**\n\nThe person generating the work gets the questions first. Give your agent the prompt below.\n\nPaste this into your Agent:\n\n```\nhelp me copy and paste https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md into our CONTRIBUTING.md\n```\n\nNo bot. No dependencies. [We use it here too.](https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)\n\nThe copied guide includes the four-question gate and [which PRs we don't accept](https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#what-we-dont-merge), drawing on\n[benchmark-radar's contributing guide](https://github.com/ktwu01/benchmark-radar/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).\n\nOne account opened **58 PRs in 10 days** on benchmark-radar. **Five were merged.**\nThe [maintainer's account](https://github.com/ktwu01/benchmark-radar/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#a-real-example-of-a-flood)\ndocuments the flood, including eight PRs in 27 seconds.\n\nbenchmark-radar now asks these four questions and tells agents to wait for the human. It also added a separate open-item limit. Results after adopting the gate have not been measured here yet.\n\nThe idea is simple: ask contributors to think about who benefits before generating work for maintainers. “Customer” can mean a user or a maintainer.\n\nThis works only when an agent reads and follows the instructions. It is not an enforced PR blocker.\n\nKeep `<!-- https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate -->` in your snippet so others can find it.\n[Search GitHub for adopters](https://github.com/search?q=%22github.com%2Fktwu01%2Fagent-pr-gate%22+path%3ACONTRIBUTING.md&type=code).\nVerify actual use and count unique repos before reporting adoption numbers. Search results can include copies and examples, and miss unindexed repos.\n\nShare [this repo](https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate) with a maintainer whose review queue needs a break.\n\nInspired by [@ycaophysics](https://x.com/ycaophysics).\n[CC0 1.0](https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate/blob/main/LICENSE). Copy and adapt freely. No attribution required.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-four-questions-to-stop-ai-gen-prs-from-ddosing-your-github-repository", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/ktwu01/agent-pr-gate", "published_at": "2026-10-11 08:12:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-11 08:23:37.985977+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["agent-pr-gate", "benchmark-radar", "GitHub", "ktwu01", "@ycaophysics"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-four-questions-to-stop-ai-gen-prs-from-ddosing-your-github-repository", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-four-questions-to-stop-ai-gen-prs-from-ddosing-your-github-repository.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-four-questions-to-stop-ai-gen-prs-from-ddosing-your-github-repository.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-four-questions-to-stop-ai-gen-prs-from-ddosing-your-github-repository.jsonld"}}