Nightgauge: issue-to-PR overnight — six stages, twenty-one deterministic gates
Jul 22 Nightgauge (open-core): local issue→PR pipeline with isolated stage handoffs, build-as-hard-gate validation, batch overnight runs, cascade circuit breaker — nothing ships unmeasured.
Source: Nightgauge — Work the day shift. Ship the night shift.
Nightgauge (Mark McCorkle / Edibu; open-core Apache-2.0, Jul 22) is the productized form of the continuous overnight factory: days for PRDs and stories; nights for an issue-to-PR pipeline that agents run locally on your machine. Tagline discipline: nothing ships unmeasured. Six stages — Issue Pickup → Feature Planning → Feature Dev → Feature Validate → PR Create → PR Merge — each in isolated context with JSON handoffs, not an accumulated conversation; the site claims ninety-four verified phases and twenty-one deterministic gates after LLM stages. Planning is documentation-first and approval-gated; validation treats build pass as a hard gate; PRs carry full stage traceability; merge can auto-fix lint/format within a bounded envelope and escalate with a stage-exit diagnostic when it cannot.
Guardrails sit beside the pipeline: cascade circuit breaker (clustered failures pause, no auto-resume), prompt-injection firewall, failure taxonomy that keeps infra blips out of health scores, hash-chained audit archival, baseline detection so auto-fix only owns regressions it introduced. Batch overnight runs queue multiple issues sequentially; cost-aware model routing picks within a performance envelope from your own success history. VS Code extension + Go orchestrator + portable skills across Claude / Copilot / Codex / Cursor / Gemini; cloud off by default. A public run cited on the product page (issue #338, 2026-08-29) finished six stages in ~83 minutes for ~$6.72. Still early stars; actively shipping (v0.4.5 landed 2026-09-21).
Why it matters for code review
Always-on factories beat peak-session heroics when the night ends in gated PRs with phase evidence, not a hero transcript. Treat Nightgauge’s stage gates and morning queue of reviewed PRs as the review surface — promote what survived deterministic verify, reopen what the circuit breaker parked — so overnight capacity compounds merge rate under load instead of inventing a morning archaeology tax.