ROS PMC unveils Baffle Maker to triage AI vs human PRs
New tool clusters open PRs into human, bot, and AI buckets for maintainers.
The ROS PMC held its weekly meeting on July 21, 2026, covering infrastructure updates, working group progress, and a new triage tool for the Waffle meeting. Key highlights include a formal decision passing to create ros2/pmc_scripts — a PMC-owned, Apache-licensed repository for utility scripts like the waffle-maker. The Buildfarm dashboard is now deployed, linking test failures automatically to known issues via a match on test names, though not fully automatic yet.
The standout development is Baffle Maker, demoed by Andrew Symington. This tool wraps the existing waffle-maker script, scrapes contributor metadata, and clusters open pull requests into four categories: likely-human, unknown, bot, and likely-AI — with markers for project members and flags for undisclosed AI usage. It regenerates daily via CI and will be trialed at the next Waffle meeting to help maintainers give meaningful feedback to human contributors first. Additional updates include a Joint SIG proposal for CI improvements, a canonical examples proposal with Gazebo, and the Lyrical release working group ending after its retrospective.
- Baffle Maker clusters PRs into human, bot, and likely-AI buckets to prioritize human contributors.
- Buildfarm dashboard now live — links test failures to known issues by matching test names.
- PMC approved ros2/pmc_scripts repo; Lyrical release working group concludes after retrospective.
Why It Matters
Helps ROS maintainers efficiently triage PRs amid rising AI-generated contributions, saving hours weekly.