Flue and tldraw now auto-close outside pull requests

Flue and tldraw now auto-close pull requests from outside contributors, converting them into issues instead of reviewing the code. The change matters most for first-time contributors, who now compete with a maintainer's own tuned agent for the same merge decision.

Vercel's AI SDK team describes a similar split without the auto-close. Its agent factory authors 25 to 35% of merged pull requests and closes 70 to 80% of issues, according to Latent Space. The team put its backlog at more than 1,000 open issues and nearly 800 open PRs. That backlog is why they automated in the first place.

For a contributor, the fix stops being the valuable part of a submission. A clean reproduction with a failing test now beats a patch, because generating the patch is what the agent is for. Write the issue like a task spec, since the issue is what the agent works from.

The AI SDK numbers offer a template for maintainers considering the same move. About a third of merged code comes from an agent, with a human still holding the merge button. Getting there took tuning the agent's configuration, not flipping a switch.

GitHub posted the change in its changelog on September 1, the day Latent Space's piece went up. Copilot code review can now submit approvals that count toward a repository's required-approvals rule. The feature is off by default. It's configurable down to specific file paths, and it gets dismissed on new commits like a human reviewer's approval would.