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Agentic Mentoring skill family

Scope. Works on any project, ASF or not — no Apache-Software-Foundation-specific assumptions baked in.

Maintainer-facing skills that join contributor threads in a teaching register, author newcomer-ready issues, curate the existing backlog for newcomers, orient first-time contributors, and track a contributor’s readiness path to committer nomination. Five skills shipped at experimental.

MISSION names Agentic Mentoring as the highest-value project-side mode and the one off-the-shelf agent tooling skips. The framework lands the spec — tone guide, hand-off protocol, adopter contract — and the skill implementations together, so the project’s tone choices are reviewable independently of runtime behaviour and can be evolved without editing the skill body.

Skills

Skill Purpose Status
pr-management-mentor Draft a teaching-register comment on a single GitHub issue or PR thread; waits for maintainer confirmation before posting. experimental
good-first-issue-author Draft one net-new good first issue from a supplied gap or small task; a suitability gate and R1–R9 readiness checklist gate the draft; waits for maintainer confirmation before filing via gh. experimental
mentoring-welcome Draft a first-contact orientation comment for a first-time contributor on a newly opened issue or PR; detects first-time authorship via the GitHub author_association field; skips repeat contributors. experimental
contributor-to-committer Read-only readiness tracker that maps a contributor’s GitHub activity against the adopter’s declared committer/PMC thresholds; surfaces a traffic-light brief (Not yet / Approaching / Ready to nominate) plus the specific evidence gaps that remain. experimental
good-first-issue-sweep Sweep the open issue backlog for existing issues that could be labelled as good first issues; scores each against the G1–G7 suitability rubric and classifies as READY / NEAR-MISS / SKIP; proposes labels only after explicit maintainer confirmation. experimental

All five skills are read-only on tracker state or draft-then-confirm: no skill posts, labels, closes, or files anything without explicit maintainer confirmation in-session.

What each skill covers

  • pr-management-mentor — the thread-level Agentic Mentoring skill. Reads an issue or PR thread, decides whether a teaching-register intervention is warranted (clarifying question, convention pointer, paired example from a prior PR), drafts the comment, and waits for maintainer confirmation before posting. Never reviews code, routes PRs, or authors fixes — those are Agentic Triage and Agentic Drafting respectively.
  • good-first-issue-author — the issue on-ramp skill. Takes a maintainer- supplied gap or small task, applies a suitability gate (too large, security- sensitive, or requiring a design decision → decline), runs through R1–R9 readiness criteria, and drafts one self-contained issue a newcomer can pick up without prior repo context: scope, code pointers, contributing-doc links, acceptance criteria, and a rough effort estimate.
  • mentoring-welcome — the first-contact skill. Triggered immediately after a first-time contributor opens an issue or PR. Drafts a lightweight orientation comment (contributing-guide link, community-norm pointers, expected next steps). Skips silently for repeat contributors and security-sensitive threads.
  • contributor-to-committer — the readiness-tracking skill. Takes a GitHub handle, fetches their public activity on <upstream>, and maps it against the adopter’s declared committer or PMC thresholds from committer-readiness.md. Returns a traffic-light verdict (Not yet / Approaching / Ready to nominate) plus a gap table showing exactly what evidence the contributor still needs. Read-only; never opens a nomination thread, sends a message, or modifies any record.
  • good-first-issue-sweep — the backlog-curation skill. Sweeps the open issue backlog and scores each issue against the G1–G7 suitability rubric (scope, self-containment, code pointer, small effort, no security sensitivity, no architectural decision, no deprecation decision). Classifies each as READY (propose the GFI label), NEAR-MISS (surface specific edits that would make it GFI-ready), or SKIP (not suitable). Complements good-first-issue-author: the sweep stocks the on-ramp queue from existing work; the author creates net-new issues from supplied gaps. Read-only; proposes labels only after explicit maintainer confirmation.

Adopter contract

The skills resolve project-specific content from these files in the adopter’s <project-config>/ directory:

File Used by
mentoring-config.md pr-management-mentor (tone knobs, hand-off team, footer, max_agent_turns)
good-first-issue-config.md good-first-issue-author, good-first-issue-sweep (candidate-scope rules, GFI-label name, suitability rubric threshold)
mentoring-welcome-config.md mentoring-welcome (welcome-comment bodies, detection rules, contributing-guide URL)
committer-readiness.md contributor-to-committer (committer/PMC threshold declarations: PR count, review count, issue participation, tenure window)

See the spec’s Adopter contract section for the required key documentation.

Status

Experimental. Five skills shipped. No adopter has run the full contributor-to-committer interaction path under evaluation conditions yet; shape may change between framework versions.

To provide pilot feedback, copy docs/pilot-report-template.md into your project notes, fill in each section, and optionally validate the filled-in report with:

uv run --project tools/pilot-report-validator pilot-report-validate <your-report.md>

Cross-references

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