OpenChaos is a repo where anyone submits a PR, the community votes with reactions, and the most-voted PR gets merged. The code IS the website - every merge changes what you see at openchaos.dev.
A contributor built the automerge bot from scratch. It ranks PRs by votes, checks CI, verifies rhyming titles (yes, PR titles must rhyme to merge), and merges the winner. The community then spent weeks fixing bugs in it:
- Feb 21: "Mergeability detection for automerge correction"
- Feb 24: "Three stitches for the old-age and automerge hitches"
- Feb 28: "Fix automerge rhymes-with resolution"
- Mar 3: "Fix automerge: skip the unmergeable surge"
Four fixes. All passed community vote. All had rhyming titles. The bot still couldn't merge community PRs.
On Wednesday the bot ran automatically for the first time. It walked through all 38 open PRs top to bottom:
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #211: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #193: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #216: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #215: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #214: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #210: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #209: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #183: Resource not accessible by integration.
ERROR: Failed to merge PR #160: Resource not accessible by integration.
9 community PRs failed. It then merged mine - ranked #29 with 1 vote - because I'm the repo owner and GITHUB_TOKEN can bypass branch protection for owner PRs.
The answer was one line: GITHUB_TOKEN -> MERGE_PAT. A fine-grained PAT that acts as the repo owner. The community built the entire automerge system and debugged it for weeks. The final fix was a permissions edge case.
That fix is now a PR that needs 10 votes to merge under the new weekly rules. If it hits 10 by today 19:00 UTC, it'll be the first truly automatic democratic merge.
2 months in: 949 stars, 3,000+ unique voters, community-built themes, a researcher from TU Delft studying the voting patterns, and a bot that's one vote away from actually working.
https://openchaos.dev | https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos
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