Core-gate

core-gate in action
need work
ready for review
need attention
No feedback on existing repos
Comprehensive feedback on core-gate
Other repos that need it

Inspiration

Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation powering the global Bitcoin network. As the project grows, maintainers face a real bottleneck: AI agents alone generated roughly 17 million pull requests per month on GitHub as of March 2026, up 325% in six months, and one prominent maintainer reported that only 1 in 10 AI-generated PRs is legitimate. Bitcoin Core's existing CI takes over an hour to run and checks code correctness -> it says nothing about whether A PR is not even worth a maintainer's time to read. Core-Gate fixes that.

What it does

Core-Gate is a GitHub Actions workflow that runs in under 30 seconds on every incoming PR -> before Bitcoin Core's CI even starts. It scores each PR against Bitcoin Core's actual contribution guidelines and routes it into one of three lanes:

Needs Work (below 40/100): AI posts specific fix instructions. PR labeled needs work.

Needs Attention (40-64/100): Close but incomplete. AI posts targeted feedback.

Ready for Review (65+/100): Labeled ready-for-review, routed to maintainer queue.

Scoring covers five checks from Bitcoin Core's CONTRIBUTING.md: component prefix, PR description quality, commit message format, diff size, and test coverage. Additional signals include risk profiling by file path, buzzword/AI slop detection, BIP requirement for consensus changes, and live Bitcoin Core label fetching.

How we built it

Core-Gate runs entirely inside GitHub Actions — no external servers, no webhooks, no infrastructure. GITHUB_TOKEN is auto-injected by GitHub. An AI API key stored as a repo secret powers the feedback. The scorer is a plain Node.js rules engine — fully auditable, no black box. Labels are applied by deterministic code, not AI. The AI only writes the human-readable feedback comment.

Challenges we ran into

Testing with existing Bitcoin Core PRs

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Core-Gate scored its own pull request during development and correctly caught a real contribution guideline violation -> missing component prefix and overly long commit messages. The tool works on real PRs, not just mocks.
The entire tool is a single workflow file and two scripts. Any Bitcoin Core fork can add it in under 5 minutes.
Runs in parallel with Bitcoin Core's existing CI without touching anything they already have.