platisd/openai-pr-description GitHub Action

Autofill the description of your pull requests with the power of OpenAI!

What does it do?

platisd/openai-pr-description is a GitHub Action that looks at the title as well as the contents of your pull request and uses the OpenAI API to automatically fill up the description of your pull request. Just like ChatGPT would! 🎉
The Action tries to focus on why the changes are needed rather on what they are, like any proper pull request description should.

The GitHub Action will (by default) only run when a PR description is not already provided. In other words it will not accidentally overwrite your existing description, unless you opt-in to do so by setting the overwrite_description input to true. The idea is this Action will save you the time and trouble of writing meaningful pull request descriptions.
You can customize it in different ways. One of them allows the Action to only run on pull requests started by specific users, e.g. the main maintainers of the repository. Keep in mind the OpenAI API is not free to use. That being said, so far it's been rather cheap, i.e. around ~$0.10 for 15-20 pull requests so far.

How can you use it?

1. Create an account on OpenAI, set up a payment method and get your OpenAI API key.
2. Add the OpenAI API key as a secret in your repository's settings.
3. Create a workflow YAML file, e.g. .github/workflows/openai-pr-description.yml with the following contents:

name: Autofill PR description

on: pull_request

jobs:
  openai-pr-description:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04

    steps:
      - uses: platisd/openai-pr-description@master
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          openai_api_key: ${{ secrets.OPENAI_API_KEY }}

Input	Description	Required	Default
github_token	The GitHub token to use for the Action	Yes
openai_api_key	The OpenAI API key to use, keep it hidden	Yes
pull_request_id	The ID of the pull request to use	No	Extracted from metadata
openai_model	The OpenAI model to use	No	gpt-4o-mini
max_tokens	The maximum number of prompt tokens to use	No	1000
temperature	Higher values will make the model more creative (0-2)	No	0.6
sample_prompt	The prompt to use for giving context to the model	No	See SAMPLE_PROMPT
sample_response	A sample response for giving context to the model	No	See GOOD_SAMPLE_RESPONSE
completion_prompt	The prompt to use for the model to generate the PR description	No	See COMPLETION_PROMPT
overwrite_description	Whether to overwrite the PR description if it already exists	No	false

Demo

• platisd/smartcar_shield/pull/70
  • The GitHub Action explained why it is useful to add itself to a repository. 🤯

• platisd/cpp-command-parser/pull/16
  • A decent explanation on why fetching GoogleTest during the cmake build instead of version controlling it, is a good idea. 🎯

• platisd/clang-tidy-pr-comments/pull/43
  • I would improve it a bit, some parts are a bit off, but with small modifications it'd better than the PR description I originally had. 😅

403 error when updating the PR description

If you get a 403 error when trying to update the PR description, it's most likely because the GitHub Action is not allowed to do so. The easiest way forward is to grant the necessary permissions to the GITHUB_TOKEN secret at <your_repo_url>/settings/actions under Workflow permissions.