Sweep stalled GitHub assignments

Find assigned-but-stalled issues, nudge the assignee, warn them, and release the assignment on a fixed grace-period progression.

Run a squatter sweep when assigned issues have gone quiet: it finds assignees who have not acted, posts a polite fixed-template nudge, and, after a grace period with no reply, releases the assignment so someone else can pick the issue up. It never reassigns to another person and never closes an issue.

$ blowhorn github squatters --repo owner/name --dry-run

A dry run is the default posture. Without --apply the sweep prints exactly what it would nudge, warn, or unassign, with the backend it resolved and the silence behind each decision, and writes nothing. When the preview looks right, run it for real:

$ blowhorn github squatters --repo owner/name --apply

The progression

For each assignee, silence is measured from the later of their assignment date and their last activity -- a comment, a linked pull request, or a status change. Any activity resets the clock.

• Silence reaches --nudge-after-days (default 14): a nudge is posted. It thanks the assignee, notes the days of silence, and asks whether they are still working on it or would like to hand it back.
• --warn-after-days (default 7) after the nudge with still no reply: a final warning is posted, stating the date the assignment will be released.
• --unassign-after-days (default 7) after the warning with still no reply: the assignee is removed and a short closing comment is posted, thanking them and noting the issue is open for someone else.

The same repository state always produces the same decisions and the same comment text: the policy is a fixed rule and the bump texts are fixed templates with only factual variables substituted. No model is involved, and no run posts a second nudge or warning inside the same window.

What is never bumped

• Issues with an open linked pull request from the assignee.
• Issues labelled blocked, waiting-on-maintainer, needs-maintainer, waiting-for-maintainer, or on-hold.
• Security-related issues (labels containing security, plus vulnerability and cve-*).
• Issues whose assignee is the issue's own author.

Immediately before any write the issue is re-read, so a run never unassigns someone who just became active. After five consecutive backend failures the run halts and says so, rather than spraying comments across the rest of the list.

How it talks to GitHub

No CLI is required, and nothing is vendored: the sweep talks to GitHub's GraphQL API over HTTPS, so it runs wherever Blowhorn runs without a gh or gh-axi binary installed. It runs with the store's GitHub token -- the profile's GH_TOKEN -- never with a second credential, so bumps post as that profile. A token that is missing or unauthenticated is a hard error, never a silent fallback to a different auth context. The sweep acts as one profile only: pass a single --profile naming the profile whose token it should use.

$ blowhorn github squatters --repo owner/name --dry-run --nudge-after-days 21

Related

• GitHub - every GitHub action, side by side.
• blowhorn github - the command reference.