Deterministic PR gating using decision contracts (no heuristics, no AI)

[pavancharak]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

Most PR workflows today rely on some mix of:

• manual review
• CI checks
• tribal knowledge

But decisions themselves are not first-class.

We’ve been working on a system where PRs are evaluated against explicit decision contracts instead of relying on reviewers or implicit rules.

Basic idea:

• Define decisions as contracts (JSON)
• Each contract encodes a deterministic rule
• On PR open/update → webhook triggers evaluation
• All contracts are executed
• If any fail → PR is blocked via commit status
• If all pass → PR is mergeable

Example:

{
"contractIds": ["contract.ageCheck.v1"],
"input": { "age": 17 }
}

→ Fails deterministically
→ PR cannot merge (manthan/pr-gate)

No heuristics.
No AI.
No interpretation layer.

Just:
deterministic → auditable → enforceable decisions.

Question for the community:

Do you see value in treating decisions as enforceable primitives in PR workflows (beyond CI tests and policy tools)?

Where would this break in real-world repos?

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