Adopt PR Branch Context

What it does

When your agent uses it

• Picking up someone else's pull request that has no local context
• Backfilling a brief for your own PR that predates the branch-context setup
• Recovering the decisions made in already-resolved review threads

Example prompts

• “Adopt the PR on my current branch and write the issue brief from its linked issue.”
• “I just checked out a colleague's pull request, so backfill pr-decisions.md from the resolved review threads.”
• “Bootstrap branch context for this PR before I continue the work.”

Requirements

• The gh CLI authenticated for the repository
• A worktree with the PR branch checked out
• The branch-context skill files in the repository
• Pre-approved tools (allowed-tools): Bash(git:*), Bash(gh:*), Bash(jq:*), Bash(date:*), Bash(ls:*), Bash(cat:*), Bash(cp:*), Bash(.claude/skills/branch-context/*), Read, Write, Edit, Glob, Grep, AskUserQuestion

Workflow steps

7 steps, taken from the step headings in SKILL.md.

1. 1Resolve the PR
2. 2Resolve linked issues
3. 3Study the existing diff
4. 4Write issue-brief.md
5. 5Backfill pr-decisions.md from resolved threads
6. 6Seed an "adoption" meta-entry
7. 7Report

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 4399efa. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves these tools, so the agent can use them without asking each time:

  • Bash(git:*)
  • Bash(gh:*)
  • Bash(jq:*)
  • Bash(date:*)
  • Bash(ls:*)
  • Bash(cat:*)
  • Bash(cp:*)
  • Bash(.claude/skills/branch-context/*)
  • Read
  • Write

  …and 4 more on the same allowed-tools line.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  Shell commands in SKILL.md call:

  • git
  • gh

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  No URLs in SKILL.md. Its commands use git and gh, which can reach the network depending on how they are called.

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Adopt PR Branch Context loads about 1.8k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 77 tokens; SKILL.md has 621 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~77

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.8k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from pydantic/pydantic-ai-harness at commit 4399efa, republished under its MIT licence (© pydantic). 621 words, ~1,751 tokens.

name

adopt-pr

description

Bootstrap branch-context on an existing PR. Writes issue-brief.md from the linked issue(s) + current PR state, and backfills pr-decisions.md with decision-bearing entries from already-resolved review threads. Use when picking up a PR mid-flight (yours or someone else's) without prior local context.

allowed-tools

Bash(git:*), Bash(gh:*), Bash(jq:*), Bash(date:*), Bash(ls:*), Bash(cat:*), Bash(cp:*), Bash(.claude/skills/branch-context/*), Read, Write, Edit, Glob, Grep, AskUserQuestion

user-invocable

true

gh pr view "$PR_NUMBER" --json number,title,url,state,headRefName,body,closingIssuesReferences,createdAt,author

gh issue view "<N>" --json number,url,title,state,body,labels,comments

git fetch origin main 2>/dev/null || git fetch origin master
MERGE_BASE=$(git merge-base HEAD origin/main 2>/dev/null || git merge-base HEAD origin/master)
git diff --stat "$MERGE_BASE"..HEAD
git log --oneline "$MERGE_BASE"..HEAD

read -r OWNER REPO < <(gh repo view --json owner,name -q '.owner.login + " " + .name')
gh api graphql -f query='
query($owner:String!,$repo:String!,$pr:Int!){
  repository(owner:$owner,name:$repo){
    pullRequest(number:$pr){
      reviewThreads(first:100){ nodes{
        isResolved
        comments(first:50){ nodes{ author{login} bodyText url path } }
      }}
    }
  }
}' -F owner="$OWNER" -F repo="$REPO" -F pr="$PR_NUMBER" \
  --jq '.data.repository.pullRequest.reviewThreads.nodes | map(select(.isResolved))'

.claude/skills/branch-context/append-pr-decision.sh \
  --title "thread: <short title>" \
  --decision "<one-line summary of what was decided>" \
  --why "<one-line reason, quoting reviewer or author if concise>" \
  --source "<thread URL>" \
  --iter "-"

.claude/skills/branch-context/append-pr-decision.sh \
  --title "adopted PR #<N> at <DATE>" \
  --decision "Branch-context bootstrapped from existing PR + issue(s). Decisions above are backfilled from resolved threads." \
  --why "PR predates the branch-context setup" \
  --source "<PR URL>" \
  --iter "-"

Adopted PR #<N> -- "<title>"
  Issues linked: #<A>, #<B>
  Resolved threads seeded: <count> decisions
  Unresolved threads (for later triage): <count>

© pydantic, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in .agents/skills/adopt-pr of pydantic/pydantic-ai-harness.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 4399efa