submit marks existing draft PRs ready for review without --open, firing review requests
- Dominant language
- Go
- Stars
- 1.5k
- Forks
- 70
- Avg merge
- 1d 8h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 7
Description
## Environment
- gh 2.96.0 (2026-07-02), gh-stack **v0.0.4**, git 2.46.1, macOS 26.6
## Summary
`gh stack submit --auto` marked two already-open draft PRs as ready for review, which fired review requests to five CODEOWNERS. I did not pass `--open`.
The help text is explicit that this should not happen:
> New PRs are created as drafts by default. Use `--open` to mark them as ready for review.
## Repro
```
gh stack submit --auto # creates PR A and PR B as drafts
gh pr view A --json isDraft # => true, as documented
# ... make no change to the branches ...
gh stack submit --auto # second run, still no --open
gh pr view A --json isDraft # => false
```
Second run's output, which gives no indication it changed draft state:
```
Checking stack state...
Pushing to origin...
PR #A for branch-a is up to date
PR #B for branch-b is up to date
✓ Stack updated on GitHub with 2 PRs
✓ Pushed and synced 2 branches
```
The PR timeline confirms it:
```
ready_for_review by=
review_requested by= x5
```
Those timestamps match the second `submit` to the second. I made no other change in between, and did not touch the web UI.
## Why it matters
Marking a PR ready is not a local operation. It notifies every CODEOWNER, and on a repo with required reviewers it moves the PR into other people's queues. Doing it on an update pass, from a flag whose documented meaning is "use auto-generated titles without prompting", is surprising in a way that cannot be undone: `gh pr ready --undo` restores draft state but the notifications have already gone out.
It also makes `submit` unusable as an idempotent "sync my stack" command, which is what its output implies it is when everything is already up to date.
## Expected
`submit` should only change draft state when `--open` is passed. If the current behaviour is deliberate for update passes, the help text should say so, and the output should name the change instead of printing `is up to date`.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start by running the reported two-pass `gh stack submit --auto` reproduction and inspect the `submit` command's update path, especially where existing pull requests are handled. Compare that path with the `--open` behavior and verify with `gh pr view A --json isDraft`; done means repeat submissions leave existing drafts unchanged unless `--open` is passed, with tests covering the regression.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- github, go
- Domain
- api, cli
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 58/100