gh-pr-trust-scan

Evaluate whether a GitHub repository is likely to reject AI-assisted pull requests — before you fork it.

Motivation

A growing number of open-source projects enforce explicit policies against AI-generated contributions. These range from automated "trust-gate" CI workflows (e.g. fossier) to CONTRIBUTING.md clauses that label AI-assisted PRs as policy violations. Discovering these policies after you've already forked, implemented, and submitted a PR wastes everyone's time. gh-pr-trust-scan surfaces these signals upfront in a single CLI command — so you can make an informed decision before investing effort.

How it differs from similar tools

Most PR-quality scanners focus on code review automation or detecting spam. gh-pr-trust-scan specifically targets the contributor experience risk: "Will this project reject my AI-assisted PR on ideological/policy grounds?" It does not evaluate code quality, licensing, or security vulnerabilities.

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• GitHub CLI (gh) authenticated (gh auth login)

Background

For the motivation and approach behind this tool, see the companion article: Pre-fork due diligence for OSS contributors

Related: Self-dogfooding: using my own AI-PR scanner to ship a fix to ONNX — a real walkthrough of using this tool in a contribution flow.

Installation

# With pipx (recommended — isolated environment)
pipx install gh-pr-trust-scan

# Or with pip
pip install gh-pr-trust-scan

During development (local clone):

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Usage

# Basic scan
gh-pr-trust-scan owner/repo

# Full GitHub URL also works
gh-pr-trust-scan https://github.com/owner/repo

# JSON output for scripting / CI integration
gh-pr-trust-scan owner/repo --json

# Custom gh binary path
gh-pr-trust-scan owner/repo --gh-bin /usr/local/bin/gh

Example output

Scanning tursodatabase/turso ...

Repo: tursodatabase/turso
Verdict: AVOID  (trust-gate detected)

Findings:
  [HIGH  ] Fossier auto-rejection workflow present (.github/workflows/pr-check.yml)
  [MEDIUM] 'human-written' requirement found (line 42): All submissions must be human-written (CONTRIBUTING.md)
  [LOW   ] No explicit AI ban label found

Stats:
  Last commit: 2 days ago
  Open PRs: 47
  Closed-no-merge PRs (last 30): 12

JSON output

gh-pr-trust-scan owner/repo --json

{
  "repo": "owner/repo",
  "verdict": "AVOID",
  "findings": [
    {
      "severity": "HIGH",
      "category": "trust_gate",
      "evidence": "Fossier action (PThorpe92/fossier) detected",
      "file": ".github/workflows/pr-check.yml"
    }
  ],
  "stats": {
    "last_commit": "2 days ago",
    "open_prs": 47,
    "closed_no_merge_last_30d": 12,
    "flagged_closed_prs": 0
  }
}

Verdicts

Verdict	Condition
AVOID	At least one HIGH-severity finding (automated rejection gate present)
WARN	No HIGH, but MEDIUM findings (discouraging policy language or labels)
SAFE	All LOW or no findings (no explicit AI contribution policy detected)

What gets scanned

Signal	Severity
.github/workflows/*.yml — fossier, trust-score, anti-slop, min-global-merge-ratio	HIGH
CONTRIBUTING.md / README.md / PR template / Code of Conduct — "no AI", "AI is not allowed", "AI tools are not permitted", "prohibit AI", "reject AI", "ban AI", "LLM not allowed", "Copilot is not allowed", "ChatGPT not allowed"	HIGH
Same files — "human-authored", "human-written", "disclose AI", "AI disclosure required"	MEDIUM
Repository labels — no-ai, ai-rejected, human-only, ai-ban, ai-generated-rejected	MEDIUM
Recent closed PRs with spam-likely / suspicious-author labels	MEDIUM
No AI ban labels found	LOW (informational)

Customizing patterns

All detection keywords are in src/gh_pr_trust_scan/patterns.py. To add your own:

# patterns.py
WORKFLOW_PATTERNS.append({
    "pattern": r"my-custom-gate-action",
    "severity": "HIGH",
    "category": "trust_gate",
    "description": "Custom trust gate detected",
})

PRs adding new patterns for emerging tools are very welcome.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! The most impactful PRs are new detection patterns for trust-gate tools or AI-ban policy language that isn't yet covered. Please open an issue first to discuss significant changes.

# Set up dev environment
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest

# Run linter
ruff check src/ tests/

Potential extensions

The following are out of scope for v0.1 but are good candidates for future PRs:

• GitHub token-based fallback (for unauthenticated use without gh)
• --history flag to check recent PR close reasons via GraphQL
• GitLab / Gitea support
• Config file for per-project allowlists

Support

If this tool helped you, consider sponsoring continued development:

Acknowledgments

This tool was built to scratch a real itch encountered while preparing AI-assisted contributions to open-source projects. Thanks to the maintainers of every repository that has clearly documented its AI contribution policy — your documentation is what makes a tool like this possible.

See the companion article Pre-fork due diligence for OSS contributors for the broader context and rejection-vector taxonomy.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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