Weeks 8 & 9: The Bot Only Listened to Its Master
On Wednesday, the automerge bot ran for the first time. It skipped 9 leading community PRs and merged the maintainer's PR - ranked #29 with 1 vote. The bot has never merged a community PR. Not once in 2 months. Today, Saturday, 7th of March 2026 - it will start working fully (if we reach vote threshold).
The experiment: OpenChaos is a repo where anyone submits a PR, the community votes with reactions, and the most-voted PR merges daily. Last time, rhyming law was introduced for PRs to be eligible for merging and PR death-as-a-feature was introduced.
This week, chaos took an interesting turn - unexpected PR merge brought us back to weekly merges with inevitable maintainer's veto on next single merge. Good news: automatic merges will now work, maintainer should be able to step back from the project, letting it be purely community-driven.
Note: Community readers called out the AI-written posts. Fair. No AI was used writing this one - that experiment is over.
The community builds automerge
On January 26 @Loeffeldude built the first version of automerge. It merged, but it wasn't working - no downvote counting, no mergeability checks, no CI validation.
@bigintersmind decided to lead the way from there. 4 PRs merged - Feb 20, 24, 28, Mar 3. He made sure the automatic merge is up-to-date in terms of functionality, added detailed logging, rhyming resolution and skipping unmergeable PRs.
The first automatic merge ...goes wrong
Tuesday Mar 4, 19:00 UTC - bot runs. It outputs full PR rankings in logs (38 PRs). 9 top mergeable PRs pass all checks and are on their way to be merged, only to fail with "Resource not accessible by integration".
It skips through the list and hits maintainer's #218 PR, ranked #29 with only 1 vote. It merges.
The bug and the fix
GITHUB_TOKEN is the default token GitHub Actions gives to workflows. It works for reading code, posting comments, closing PRs. But merging pushes a commit to a protected branch - and the integration token can't do that when branch protection is enabled. The repo owner's PRs bypass this. Everyone else's don't. That's why mine merged and nobody else's could.
The community spent weeks fixing mergeability detection, rhyme resolution, CI validation - all correct, all working. The real problem was one level deeper: the token itself didn't have permission to merge.
The fix is one line. GITHUB_TOKEN -> MERGE_PAT. PR #219 needs 10 votes to merge under the new weekly rules. If it doesn't hit 10 by Saturday, the bot stays broken for another week.
Meanwhile in the chaos
On Feb 25, @matthewmayer built a museum. An actual /museum page - classical serif fonts, beige walls. He archived dickbutt.gif as a cultural artifact and put DOOM in its own wing for "historical reflection, educational study, and ripping and tearing". PR #203 passed the vote. The museum was open.
Eight days later, @amanbabuhemant merged PR #187: "Cat and Scat 🐱". It replaced dickbutt with a cat GIF, changed fart sounds to meows, stuffed Clippy full of cat facts, and filled TOTALLY_HARMLESS_FILE.txt with ASCII cat art.
The museum still references /dickbutt.gif in the code. The file no longer exists.
@matthewmayer's response was immediate - PR #215: "Cats in our Stack? We're Putting Dickbutt Back".
In a tragic lapse of museum security, a clowder of internet-native felines infiltrated our digital archives. While we appreciate their enthusiasm for "zoomies," their chaotic energy resulted in the inadvertent deletion of our most prestigious cultural artifact: dickbutt.gif.
That PR is still open. The fate of dickbutt is in the community's hands.
Oh, and we now have 3 themes. Every visit is a coin flip between Web 2.0, ASCII, and a 1920s newspaper called The Daily Chaos (PR #204 by @bigintersmind).
What got merged by accident
Now the unexpected sequence of events caused by this chaos - PR #218 was merged. What does that mean?
It means we've just unintentionally gone back to weekly merges as in week 1 and week 2. Weeks 3-9 were daily merges, project was going top speed, although exhausting its own engagement as more and more people dropped, being unable to follow with the speed project was going at.
People have lives. Not everyone is willing to follow the evolution of a project every day.
What this means
Every "democratic merge" so far was manually done by me, the current maintainer. The community built the system, debugged it in a dedicated manner and now everyone is voting on the final fix, which requires at least 10 votes - otherwise community has to wait on next merge cycle to again meet the threshold.
The maintainer's accidental veto power ends Saturday - if the votes come through.
The project's first truly automatic, community-driven merge is one vote away.
We're building the plane while flying it.
Week 9 of ∞
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