First external PR merged through pi's auto-close approval workflow

External contributor distributedlock opened pull request #7887 on August 8, 2026, with a one-line fix for a missing trailing newline in pi’s generated system prompt after the “Current working directory” line. The fix targets the prompt formatting path surfaced in issue #7889, where the same author documented a reproducible gap between consecutive lines.

The PR was initially auto-closed by pi’s contributor gate. As the README documents, new contributors must open an issue and request approval before their first PR can land; the bot enforces this by closing unapproved PRs on sight. After distributedlock linked the approval request on the PR thread, a maintainer reviewed and reopened the change.

On August 10, 2026, the PR was merged into main (merge commit 3dd4623 by badlogic / Mario Zechner) — a one-commit change, so the merge SHA is also the patch SHA. The public PR record shows that several non-maintainer merges preceded #7887 between August 7 and August 10, 2026 (including work by davidbrai, cristinaponcela, and tmustier), so #7887 is not the earliest external contribution through the auto-close approval workflow. What makes it stand out is that it was the first one we could verify end-to-end through the linked-approval issue — a useful reference case for outside contributors navigating the gate.

The change itself is minimal — a single trailing newline added to one prompt template — but the precedent it sets matters. The contributor gate exists to keep the project maintainable without an inbox firehose; seeing the loop close cleanly on a small fix is what tells the next outside contributor the door is open.