The problem
GitHub shows your pull requests in whatever order they happened to be opened — not in the order they actually need your attention. A one-line typo fix and a PR touching authentication code get exactly the same visual weight in your inbox. Multiply that across a dozen open PRs and you spend more time deciding what to look at than actually reviewing.
What I built
PR Focus is a Chrome extension (Manifest V3) that sits on top of GitHub's PR pages. It combines three signals into a single priority queue:
- CI status — failing checks bubble up
- PR age — stale PRs don't get forgotten
- AI risk score (0–100) — weighted toward changes touching auth, database, or infra code
Each PR also gets a plain-English summary generated from the actual diff (not the title someone wrote at 11pm), and you can generate an approve / request-changes draft review in one click, edit it, and send — without leaving the extension.
Why BYOK instead of my own AI backend
This was the decision I spent the most time on. Running my own AI backend would have meant:
- A server in the data path of every PR diff users review — a much bigger trust ask, especially for private repos.
- Either eating the AI cost myself (unsustainable as a solo dev) or marking it up into a subscription.
Going BYOK (bring your own key — OpenAI, Groq, Mistral, or a local Ollama instance) flips both of those:
- Your GitHub token and AI key live in
chrome.storage.local. There's no server of mine in the path — PR diffs only ever go to the AI provider you explicitly configure. - Groq's free tier is generous enough to run the AI features for free for most individual workflows. You're paying provider cost directly, with zero markup, if you pay anything at all.
How it's built
- Manifest V3 — required rethinking persistence patterns that worked under MV2's persistent background page; service worker lifecycle and content script injection needed more careful handling.
- GitHub REST + GraphQL APIs rather than DOM scraping — more upfront work, but it doesn't break every time GitHub ships a frontend redesign.
- IndexedDB for local data persistence (capture history, stats).
- Gumroad for license validation instead of a subscription backend — much less infrastructure to maintain solo.
Pricing model
Free tier: multi-account GitHub switching, PR sorting/export, stale-PR notifications.
PRO ($9.50 one-time, currently 50% off the $19 regular price): AI summaries, risk scoring, one-click draft reviews, full stats history, AI-based priority sorting. No subscription — pay once, own it.
What's next
Currently solo-maintained, iterating on feedback from the first wave of GitHub stars and a community-contributed PR that got merged — which, honestly, felt like a bigger validation moment than any launch metric so far. Performance-regression detection and broader language support (Python, Go) are next on the roadmap.
Try it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pr-focus-ai-pro/ememaiabefeojkccjclglcmbjmdpnaoe
Landing + demo: https://projekta2.github.io/pr-focus-landing/
Feedback welcome — especially from anyone who's built browser extensions against the GitHub API, or who has opinions on BYOK UX.
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