Challenge: OpenClaw Build Showcase

Category: Developer Productivity / Automation

The Problem

If you've ever juggled multiple open pull requests, you know the feeling: you open GitHub at the end of the day and realize a reviewer left a comment three hours ago, CI silently failed, or a PR you marked "ready for review" has been sitting untouched for two days.

Context-switching to babysit PRs is expensive. But missing a review window is worse — it stalls your whole team.

I wanted a fix that required zero tab-switching. No dashboards. No email notifications buried under newsletters. Just a message, right where I already am.

What I Built

GitHub PR Watchdog is an OpenClaw skill that monitors your open pull requests and delivers smart, actionable alerts directly to your messaging app of choice — Telegram, Slack, Discord, or WhatsApp.

It runs silently in the background on a heartbeat schedule you control, and reaches out only when something actually needs your attention.

How It Works

The skill connects to GitHub's REST API using a personal access token stored securely in your local OpenClaw config. Every N minutes (configurable — I use 20), it:

1. 
   Fetches all open PRs across your watched repos


2. 
   Checks each PR for new activity since your last check:
   
   
   
   
   • New review comments or change requests
   
   
   • CI status changes (pass / fail / pending)
   
   
   • PRs that have been open longer than your staleness threshold
   
   
   • Approvals that are ready to merge
   
   
   
   


3. 
   Sends you a concise digest — only for PRs where something changed


4. 
   Drafts a suggested response for review comments, which you can approve and post with a single reply

No noise. No duplicates. Just signal.

Example Alert (via Telegram)

🔴 CI Failed — my-app / feat/auth-refresh

  ↳ 3 checks failed | View run →



💬 New Review — my-api / fix/rate-limiter

  @sarah_dev: "Can we extract this into a helper?"

  Suggested reply ready — send "reply 1" to post it



✅ Approved & Ready — my-app / chore/upgrade-deps

  2 approvals | No conflicts | Safe to merge

The Skill File

The core logic lives in a single SKILL.md with a small Node.js runner. OpenClaw handles the scheduling, secret management, and message routing — I just had to write the GitHub API calls and the formatting logic.

# skill.yaml (excerpt)

name: pr-watchdog

description: Monitor GitHub PRs and alert on review activity, CI status, and stale PRs

schedule: every 20 minutes

inputs:

  - GITHUB_TOKEN

  - WATCHED_REPOS       # comma-separated list

  - STALE_THRESHOLD_HRS # default: 24

  - ALERT_CHANNEL       # telegram | slack | discord

Total code: ~180 lines of JavaScript. Most of it is just formatting the output to be readable at a glance.

What Surprised Me

OpenClaw made the hard parts trivial.

Secret management, message routing, scheduling — all handled by the platform. I didn't write a single line of cron syntax or deal with webhook setup. The skill just declares what it needs and OpenClaw wires it together.

The part I didn't expect: once the skill was running, I found myself replying to the bot to take action. Typing merge 3 to merge an approved PR, or reply 2 to post a suggested response — all from Telegram, without opening a browser. That emergent interaction pattern wasn't something I planned; it just fell naturally out of how OpenClaw handles conversational context.

Impact

Since deploying PR Watchdog two weeks ago:

• Average time-to-first-response on reviews dropped from ~4 hours to ~35 minutes


• Caught 6 CI failures before they were flagged by teammates


• Zero PRs have gone stale past 24 hours

Small numbers, but real ones — for a solo dev managing 3 active repos.

Try It Yourself

@openclaw skill install pr-watchdog

Check out the full documentation on ClawHub

npm install -g openclaw@latest

openclaw onboard --install-daemon

Requirements: OpenClaw installed, a GitHub personal access token, and a connected messaging channel.

What's Next

• 
  Multi-user support — share a watchdog across a team with role-based alerting


• 
  PR health scoring — surface PRs at risk of merge conflicts early


• 
  Auto-assign reviewers based on CODEOWNERS file