pr-creator

Write PR descriptions like a developer posting in Slack, not an AI summarizing a diff. The reviewer has none of your context, so the body answers what the diff cannot: why, what it costs if wrong, and where you want their view. The diff answers what changed.

• IS: creating or updating a GitHub PR's title, body, draft state, and reviewers, attaching visuals for a UI change, plus the commit restructuring and review path that make a large diff readable.
• IS NOT: changing the code in the diff or reviewing it for bugs (use tidy), watching CI and review comments after the PR exists (use pr-babysitter), or cutting npm releases (use autoship).

Reference Files

Workflow

Copy this checklist to track progress:

PR creation progress:
- [ ] Inspect the current branch and diff against the existing PR base, or the discovered default branch merge-base
- [ ] Existing PR? gh pr view --json url,state,isDraft (state OPEN means edit, not create)
- [ ] Linear ID from branch, commits, prompt, or issue link; no ID means no prefix
- [ ] Noisy commits or a >500-line diff? references/pr-polish.md, before pushing
- [ ] PR template present? Read it (paths under Templates)
- [ ] Draft title and body against Rules and Anti-patterns
- [ ] git push -u origin HEAD
- [ ] gh pr create (or gh pr edit); then gh pr view --json url,title and return the URL
- [ ] UI change with a video or screenshots? gh pr edit <n> --attach <file> after the final body, then gh pr view <n> --json body

Do not ask the user to approve the description first; the point is speed. They can ask for a rewrite and you run gh pr edit.

Rules

1. Title. With a Linear ID: ABC-123: Add auth flow. Without one: Add auth flow. Under 60 characters, no trailing period. If the repo lints PR titles (a semantic-pull-request or commitlint workflow under .github/workflows/), use its shape and put the ID at the end: feat: add auth flow (ABC-123). Linear links on the ID wherever it sits in the title.
2. Body. One short paragraph: what changed and why it matters. Length follows the change; a one-line body is fine for a one-line fix.
3. No fake why. If the reason is not in the prompt, the Linear issue, the branch, the commits, or the diff, leave it out rather than inventing one.
4. Risk and input only when real. One Risk: line for migrations, billing, auth, permissions, irreversible writes, wide blast radius, or a subtle behavior change. One Input wanted: line when a decision in the diff is still open and the reviewer's view would change it; name the decision, never "thoughts welcome". Otherwise nothing.
5. Testing only if real. Say what you ran only if you ran it. Never a Test plan section, never checkboxes.
6. Partial work. If this PR does not finish the Linear issue, keep the ID out of the title and write Part of ABC-123 in the body. Linear's default automation moves a linked issue to Done when the PR merges; the non-closing magic word links without closing.
7. Draft and reviewers only when asked. --draft for "draft" or "WIP"; gh pr ready promotes it later, gh pr ready --undo demotes. --reviewer alice,org/team only for people the user named; CODEOWNERS already requests owners.
8. Stop after the useful content. The harness's attribution setting owns the PR footer (Generated with Claude Code, session link). Never hand-write one, and never strip one the harness or a repo policy appends. Everything above the footer is this skill's; its one-paragraph body replaces the harness's default Summary and Test plan sections.

Anti-patterns: never write these

• Openers that narrate the artifact: "This PR implements...", "This change ensures...", "This commit introduces..."
• Changelog verbs with no reason attached: "Refactored X to improve Y", "Updated Z to handle...", "Added comprehensive test coverage for..."
• Lines that start with a filename or path; the diff already lists the files
• A Test plan section with checkboxes
• A bullet list that restates the diff
• A body a reviewer must read exhaustively to find what matters: if the point is not in the first sentence, the paragraph is a summary, not a description

Examples

Feature (ABC-123 is the real Linear ID)

Title: ABC-123: Add auth flow with session management

Adds the auth flow needed for session-based login, including refresh, timeout handling, and a small error boundary for auth failures.

Input wanted: the 15-minute idle timeout is a guess; if product has a number, I'll use it.

Bugfix (real risk, real testing)

Title: PAY-482: Dedupe Stripe webhook retries

Stripe retries webhooks on timeout and our handler wasn't idempotent, so retried events created duplicate invoices. Now we record processed event IDs and skip repeats. Tested by replaying a captured retry sequence locally.

Risk: touches the billing write path.

Chore (no Linear ID, no why beyond the diff)

Title: Bump eslint to 9 and fix the new no-unused-vars hits

Bumps eslint to 9. The only code change is removing three unused imports it now flags.

The first two carry the real why from the commits and stop. Input wanted: earns its line in the first because the timeout is a decision the reviewer can change; Risk: earns its line in the second because the diff touches billing writes, and the testing sentence is there only because a replay actually ran. The third has no deeper why, so it does not pretend to.

Templates

GitHub reads the first match of pull_request_template.md (case-insensitive) in .github/, the repo root, or docs/, or a PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/ directory in any of those for multiple templates. gh pr create --body skips the template entirely, so when one exists, read it and write the body in its shape: keep its headings, answer each in a sentence or two, and put the one-paragraph description under the first heading. Add nothing the template does not ask for.

Creating the PR

Write the exact body to a temporary file with the file tool, then pass its path through --body-file. The examples use /tmp/pr-body.md; choose a task-specific temporary path during execution.

No PR yet: create

git push -u origin HEAD   # when creating a PR for local commits

gh pr create --title "ABC-123: Add auth flow" --body-file /tmp/pr-body.md

gh pr view --json url,title   # evidence the PR exists; return the url

Add --draft or --reviewer here when Rule 7 applies. --base only when the target is not the default branch.

PR already open: update title and body

gh pr edit overwrites the title and body wholesale, so draft the full replacement, not a patch. Same rules and anti-patterns apply.

# A metadata-only edit does not push local commits.

gh pr edit --title "ABC-123: Add auth flow" --body-file /tmp/pr-body.md

gh pr view --json url,title   # confirm the update; return the url

UI change: attach visuals

Visuals are optional. When the diff changes what a user sees (markup, styles, copy, or assets) and you have a short MP4 or WebM, an image, or a before and after pair, attach them so the reviewer sees the change without checking out the branch. Pick whichever shows it best: a video for motion or a flow, one image for a static change, before and after for a visual diff. A local file path in the body is not an attachment.

gh pr edit 42 --attach ./demo.mp4   # after the last body rewrite

# Before and after: label them in the body, where `**Before**` sits above
# `![Before](./before.png)`, and attach on the same call so gh swaps each
# local path for its uploaded URL. A `#Before` suffix is only alt text.
gh pr edit 42 --body-file /tmp/pr-body.md --attach ./before.png --attach ./after.png

gh pr view 42 --json body   # always, even after a non-zero exit

• Order. gh pr edit --body-file replaces the body, uploaded URL included. Attach after the last rewrite, or pass --attach on the same call as the final --body-file (gh replaces a local path the body references with the uploaded URL, and appends any other attachment). Any later rewrite copies the uploaded URL from the read-back into the new body file.
• Read back. The body must hold an uploaded /user-attachments/assets/... URL for each file (host github.com, or SUBDOMAIN.ghe.com on data-residency GHE Cloud): a video as a bare URL on its own line, which GitHub renders as a player, and an image inside ![alt](...). If some uploads fail, gh still edits the PR with the ones that landed and exits non-zero, so read the body before retrying: re-attach only what is missing, and report what landed.

Gotchas

• gh pr create on a branch with no upstream: in a TTY it blocks on a "Where should we push?" prompt; from a non-interactive harness it aborts with you must first push the current branch to a remote, or use the --head flag. Either way, git push -u origin HEAD first.
• Non-interactive gh pr create needs both --title and --body (or --fill); without them it exits with must provide --title and --body (or --fill) when not running interactively. --fill copies commit messages verbatim, which is exactly the changelog body this skill exists to avoid.
• If a body or commit message goes through a shell heredoc instead of --body-file, quote the delimiter (<<'EOF'). Unquoted <<EOF lets the shell expand backticks and $vars in the text, corrupting it or running commands.
• Two different failures look alike: on the default branch, gh pr create aborts with must be on a branch named differently than "main"; on a branch with nothing new against the base it fails with No commits between main and <branch>. The first needs a branch, the second a commit.
• A branch with an open PR fails gh pr create with a pull request for branch ... into branch main already exists. gh pr view --json state first; OPEN means gh pr edit. A MERGED or CLOSED result is a stale PR, so create a new one.
• Derive the Linear ID from the branch, uppercased: Linear's default branch format is username/abc-123-title-slug, so mblode/abc-123-add-auth gives ABC-123. Never guess an ID: Linear links the PR to whatever ID the title contains, and a wrong one moves someone else's issue.
• Plain git diff omits committed changes. Use the actual PR base with three-dot diff; do not assume main, especially for stacked PRs.
• --attach needs gh 2.99.0 or later (gh --version), a user token (an installation ghs_ token cannot upload), push access to the repository (a contributor's PR from a fork can be created but not given attachments), and github.com or GHE Cloud; GHES has no attachments. When any of these is missing, say the visuals could not be attached and where they are, rather than linking a local path in the body.
• Restructure commits before the first push. Force-pushing a rewritten branch under an open PR marks existing inline comments "outdated" and the reviewer loses their thread.

Related skills

• tidy: run before creating to check the diff for bugs and fix them; this skill edits only the PR and its commits.
• pr-babysitter: hand off after creation to watch CI, conflicts, and review comments.
• autoship: npm release pipeline (changesets, version PR, publish); "ship it" without release context routes here instead.

Maintenance only: evals/evals.json contains regression scenarios for changes to this skill; it does not load during a user task.