pr-precheck

PR Precheck

Goal: before you raise a PR, find out whether someone already tried this fix — especially whether anyone tried and got rejected. The cost of asking is seconds; the cost of a duplicate PR is reviewer attention, contributor reputation, and (on Bittensor-style mining repos) wasted scoring weight.

This skill is a thin orchestration layer over the vouch pr-cache CLI shipped in vouch ≥ this PR. It's safe to invoke directly and to chain ahead of pr-fix / prs-auto.

Invocation

Direct:

/pr-precheck <repo> <topic-summary>
/pr-precheck <repo> <topic-summary> --files a.py,b.py

Implicit (auto-fires inside pr-fix / prs-auto before the "open PR" step):

/pr-fix https://github.com/owner/repo/issues/N
   └─ before pushing the branch, run pr-precheck on the planned PR title + files

<repo> may be:

• https://github.com/<owner>/<name>
• [email protected]:<owner>/<name>.git
• <owner>/<name> (shorthand)

<topic-summary> is the title-like phrase that describes the PR you're about to raise. Be specific — short generic strings ("fix bug") will match too many cached PRs.

Prerequisites

• vouch CLI on PATH (pip install vouch-kb ≥ the version that ships pr-cache).
• gh CLI authenticated for the target repo's read scope (gh auth status returns a session).
• Optional: claude CLI on PATH or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in env — only needed if you pass --analyze-closed and want LLM-summarised "why was this closed" notes attached to each closed PR record.

If vouch is missing, stop and tell the user. Don't fall back to manual gh queries — the whole value of this skill is the cached, ranked, dedup-aware view.

Step 1 — Ensure cache is present and fresh

The cache lives at ~/.cache/vouch/pr-cache/<owner>__<name>.json. Build it if missing, or if it's older than 24 h, or if the user passes --rebuild.

CACHE=~/.cache/vouch/pr-cache/${OWNER}__${REPO}.json
if [ ! -f "$CACHE" ] || [ "$(find "$CACHE" -mmin +1440 -print 2>/dev/null)" ]; then
  vouch pr-cache build "$REPO_URL" --state all --limit 200
fi