gh-watch

In multi-AI collaborative workflows built on DeepSeek Harness, a common pain point is keeping an AI agent aware of new PR and issue activity (new push, new comment, merge, close, reopen) across a handful of GitHub repositories. Manually refreshing the GitHub browser tab is slow and easy to miss. gh-watch removes that burden by running a background poller per DSH session: each session owns its own watcher that periodically calls the GitHub REST API, diffs the result against the previous snapshot, and when a change event is detected it injects a concise notification into the current conversation or opens a fresh one so the AI can decide what to do next. The plugin deliberately stops at detection and notification; it never comments, merges, or replies on behalf of the user, leaving all judgment to the AI and the human.

Every session configures its own repository list, polling interval (minimum one minute), notify mode (inform for pure awareness or auto to ask the AI to follow up), and push target (current conversation or a new conversation), all independent of other sessions. The first poll against a repository only records a baseline snapshot so it will not flood the chat with historical items. Consecutive poll failures trigger exponential back-off at 2x, 4x, and 8x until a fully successful poll resets the counter, reducing the risk of hitting GitHub rate limits. Runtime state is persisted to a local state.json file so cursors survive a restart. Four tools are registered into the conversation context, namely gh_watch_configure, gh_watch_status, gh_watch_act, and gh_watch_stop, covering the full lifecycle of setting up, querying, actively fetching, and stopping a watcher.

It is well suited for developers or small teams running DSH with multiple AI agents who want a particular agent to keep an eye on a set of GitHub repositories. You configure the repos and interval once, and from then on gh-watch polls quietly in the background, nudging the AI whenever something changes, while you and the AI decide what action to take.