Why Pull Requests Go Stale — And Why It's a Visibility Problem, Not a People Problem

The Pattern Every engineering team that works across more than a dozen repositories eventually hits the same wall: a pull request sits open for days — sometimes weeks — not because anyone rejected it, but because no one saw it. The developer who opened it assumed the assigned reviewer got the notification. The reviewer was heads-down in a different project and missed it in a flood of GitHub emails. The engineering manager had no reason to check that specific repository on that specific day. The