Tired of forgetting to review PRs and blocking your team? StaleMate PR lives in your macOS menu bar and turns red when things start to rot.
We’ve all been the bottleneck. You close your laptop on Friday afternoon, ready for the weekend, completely forgetting about that one Pull Request awaiting your review. Come Monday morning, your teammate has been blocked for three days, and you are officially the "accidental villain" of the sprint.
To save us from this collective guilt, a solo developer built StaleMate PR—a lightweight macOS menu bar app designed to keep your PR queue clean and your team happy.
StaleMate PR is a simple, native macOS utility that keeps an eye on your GitHub and GitLab PRs. No complex setups, no bloated web views. It works like a traffic light system right on your menu bar:
It supports up to 5 independent monitors (e.g., "Assigned to me", "Team PRs", etc.), is built with 100% native SwiftUI, and is fully sandboxed. This means no Electron-based RAM hogging, and your tokens stay safely on your machine. It works perfectly with GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, and self-hosted GitLab—even if you run yours on a private vps.
When the project hit Product Hunt, developers quickly started probing its architecture.
One user asked if it could detect whether a PR is blocked specifically on you versus waiting on someone else's review. The creator honestly responded that while there is no complex automated state machine for that yet, you can easily bypass this by setting up separate monitors—one for "My PRs" and one for "Assigned to Me"—to keep your duties separate.
Another curious dev wondered: "With 5 monitors running, how does a single dot decide what color to show?" The creator clarified that each monitor acts as a separate instance with its own dedicated dot and badge number, so you can easily distinguish them at a glance.
Then came the classic API rate limit concern: "No server means client-side polling. Won't 5 monitors on busy repos hit the 5,000/hour GitHub rate limit?"
The maker had a sharp, technical answer: "We use GraphQL! This allows us to fetch everything we need in just a single query. Plus, you can adjust the polling rate and customize your queries to keep API usage super low."
At the end of the day, StaleMate PR is a prime example of doing one thing exceptionally well. In an era where every micro-tool tries to shoehorn AI features or blockchain into their tech stack, this app focuses strictly on solving a daily annoyance.
By choosing native SwiftUI over a bulky Electron wrapper, the developer respected both the user's RAM and their machine's battery life. It's practical, lightweight, and actually useful.
If you find yourself constantly apologizing for delayed PR reviews, this tiny tool might just save your working relationships.
Source: Product Hunt
