GitHub merged 90 million pull requests in a single month recently, up from 25 million in January 2023. That 3.6x increase broke the review queue. GitHub's answer is pull request limits: a configurable cap on how many open pull requests a user without write access can hold in a single repository at once. Hit the cap, close one before opening another. Copilot and other AI agents count toward the limit. Draft PRs do not. Trusted contributors go on a bypass list without gaining full write access.
The feature solves something existing interaction limits could not. GitHub's previous cooldowns were temporary. These are persistent. The behavioral effect is the point: contributors forced to choose between open PRs self-filter before anything hits the review queue. Nicholas Tindle of AutoGPT and Mike McQuaid of Homebrew both confirmed in testing that the cap made their backlogs reviewable again. OpenClaw replaced internal spam bots with it.
Pull request limits are the first of four planned controls. Archiving PRs ships soon, letting admins hide low-quality submissions without permanent deletion, a compliance requirement for many organizations. Issue limits are in development, applying the same per-user caps to issues. Smarter bypass signals are next, replacing manual trust lists with automatic criteria like a previously merged PR or account age. Cross-repository rate limiting is under exploration to catch contributors who spray PRs across hundreds of repos at once. The roadmap details are worth reading in full.
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