I let httpx's departed reviewers come back for a day. They had notes.

Description and use

Ancestors lets past reviewers of httpx provide guidance on new pull requests by citing only comments older than a year and backed by at least two reviewers.

Problem

Long‑lived open‑source projects lose the context of past reviewers, making it hard to apply historical feedback to new pull requests.

Outcome

Ancestors provides a daily review of open PRs, citing relevant historical comments and marking silent hunks, improving review quality and preserving legacy knowledge.

Workflow

• 1. Ingest all review comments via GitHub API and embed them with EmbeddingGemma.
• 2. Store embeddings in a LibSQL vector index and build a vector store.
• 3. Sample comments by year, distil a charter of recurring expectations using Gemma, and apply the two‑witness rule.
• 4. For each hunk in a new PR, retrieve the most relevant ancestor comments and the recent commit history.
• 5. Run a Mastra agent that outputs a note, ok, or silent verdict with citations, enforcing that every cited comment is retrievable.
• 6. Use Temporal to orchestrate reviewPr activities for each open PR, persisting state across worker restarts.

Evidence

Ancestors ingests that history, distils what the reviewers kept asking for, and then reviews a new diff in their collective voice.

Source

Only the dead may speak. A comment counts as an ancestor only if it is more than twelve months old, and the PR under review is never allowed to testify about itself.

Source

No citation, no verdict. Every note must cite a comment id that was actually retrieved for that hunk.

Source

Two witnesses or it does not count. A "house rule" in the charter survives only if two different comments back it.

Source

Per hunk on this CPU: 25–40 seconds. A four‑hunk PR: about two minutes.

Source