Zombie PR
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A zombie PR is one that's technically still open but the author left the company six months ago, the branch conflicts with everything, and the feature was deprioritized. It refuses to die, and nobody has the authority to close it.
Real Talk
A zombie PR is an open pull request that has lost its owner, context, or relevance but has not been closed. Causes include staff turnover, priority shifts, long-running dependencies, or unanswered review feedback. Teams benefit from auto-closing PRs after N days of inactivity to prevent drift.
When You'll Hear This
"Close the zombie PRs — anything over 90 days stale." / "That's a zombie PR, the author left in 2024."
Related Terms
PR Fatigue
PR fatigue is when your review queue has 40 open PRs and you've stopped actually reading them. You just scroll, click approve, and move on.
Pull Request (PR)
A pull request is like raising your hand in class and saying 'Hey, I made some changes — can someone check my work before we make it official?
Stale Branch
A stale branch is one that's fallen behind main so much that merging it back in is going to hurt. A branch goes stale in hours on fast-moving teams.
Zombie Branch
A zombie branch is a merged branch that's still lying around in your repo, refusing to stay dead. It got merged weeks ago. The PR is closed.