Improving Our Contribution Process & Introducing New Guidelines

[bdmorgan]

Hello everyone,

First and foremost, on behalf of the entire Google Gemini CLI team, I want to extend a huge thank you to every single person who has contributed to this project. Your passion, your pull requests, your bug reports, and your feedback have been instrumental in getting the project to where it is today.

The growth and enthusiasm from this community have been incredible. As a direct result of this success, we've encountered some "growing pains" that many successful open-source projects face. As of today, we have a backlog of over 600 open pull requests. While we are deeply grateful for every contribution, our current process has made it impossible for our team to review this volume of PRs in a timely manner.

This has led to a poor experience for you, our contributors, who are left waiting for reviews. It has also led to confusion, with multiple community members sometimes submitting PRs for the same issue, or working on something that we already have a fix for internally. This creates duplicate work and frustration for everyone.

The New "Issue-First" Policy

Going forward, we will require that all new pull requests are associated with an existing issue.

Why are we doing this?
Our goal is to allow the maintainers to reach consensus with contributors on an idea before you spend time on the code.

• Respect for your time: By discussing the solution in an Issue first, we can give you the "green light" on the approach. This prevents the frustration of spending hours coding only to have a PR rejected due to design disagreements.
• Organizing the work: Issues act as a "reservation system" so two people don't unknowingly work on the exact same bug at the same time.

To solve these problems and create a clearer, more efficient, and more respectful process for all, we are introducing a new set of contribution guidelines.

Our CONTRIBUTING.md guide has stated since the project launched that all pull requests should be accompanied by an issue. To date, we haven't enforced this.

Starting Monday January 25 2026, we will require that all new pull requests are associated with an existing issue. As the CONTRIBUTING.md guide states:

All PRs should be linked to an existing issue in our tracker. This 
ensures that every change has been discussed and is aligned 
with the project's goals before any code is written.

Between now and January 25, a comment will be added to all open PRs reminding you of this upcoming policy change. Please associate your existing PRs (and all future PRs!) with issues going forward. For more information on how to link your PR to an issue, see Linking a pull request to an issue (GitHub Docs).

[seekskyworld]

This is a good change that speeds up the review process.

[jaoyina]

Why not let Gemini Pro 3 review these PRs.

[gbmerrall]

I dropped a discussion thread recently about dealing with the large quantity of stale open issues. Happy to help assist with tidy up but only if there's a way that flagged as stale issues actually get closed out.

[lauedaitech50]

https://github.com/gemini-cli

[lauedaitech50]

https://github.com/gemini-cli

[aniruddhaadak80]

From my point of view, the issue first policy is much healthier than a large backlog of unreviewed PRs, but the policy works best when issues themselves are actively triaged and clearly claimable. If contributors need to wait too long just to know whether an issue is open for community work, the bottleneck simply moves earlier in the process. A visible help wanted or maintainer only rhythm probably matters as much as the policy text itself.