Zero-Touch Open Source: How I Automated My GitLab MRs from Email to Merge Train with Antigravity IDE & CodeRabbit

Description and use

Automating GitLab Merge Request handling with Antigravity IDE, CodeRabbit, and glab CLI eliminates manual email checks, code cleanup, linting, and CI monitoring, automatically queuing MRs into the Merge Train.

Problem

Context switching and manual admin work drain engineering focus when contributing to multiple large open‑source repositories.

Outcome

The workflow automates email triage, code cleanup, linting, CI self‑healing, and Merge Train dispatch, reducing manual effort and speeding up contribution cycles.

Workflow

• Poll unread GitLab review notifications via glab and map to open MRs
• Fetch unresolved discussion threads and run CodeRabbit for dead code and imports
• Run repo‑specific linters (rubocop, rspec, ruff, mypy, eslint, jest) and format commits to satisfy danger-review
• Watch CI jobs with glab ci status --live; if a job fails, pull trace, fix root cause, and push again
• Once all threads are resolved and CI is green, enqueue MR onto the Merge Train with glab mr merge --auto-merge

Evidence

Between checking maintainer emails, stripping out unwanted lines of code, satisfying rubocop / danger-review / ruff, and babysitting long CI/CD pipelines just to hit "Start Merge Train"

Source

GitLab Mail + Antigravity IDE + CodeRabbit + glab CLI = Clean Code Directly on the Merge Train

Source

glab ci status --live

Source

glab mr merge 264864 --auto-merge --squash=false --yes

Source