Published December 12, 2025

I got my first open source contribution today 🙌. This morning, my 4-line PR to vscode was finally merged into main.

The bug I found/fixed is very small. I’m sure 99.99% of VSCode users have never used the Delete Duplicate Lines command utility. I used this utility frequently during one of my past internships and seeing the issue everyday irritated me enough to make a PR.

I forgot about the PR until today when I received an approval notification from GitHub triggered. The PR was created on November 27, 2024, so it took 380 days to get reviewed and merged. This made me wonder how long it usually takes a PR to get merged into popular open source projects.

VSCode PR Merge Times

I used the VSCode repository as a case study. I’m going to guess there are 2 categories of people who contribute

1. People who work on the project daily and have PRs merged in frequently. Maybe they are part of a group that Microsoft sponsors to maintain the repo (in order to merge into main, a GitHub workflow enforces 2 community PR approvals, I’m referring to people in this group)

1. People who contribute a single PR and never contribute again, their PRs are not merged as quickly

Getting Data

GitHub has a GraphQL endpoint that can fetch information about PRs to public repos. I asked ChatGPT to write a script to fetch the most recent 10_000 PRs merged. In practice, I couldn’t do this because the GraphQL API only allows order by UPDATED_AT or CREATED_AT (according to ChatGPT). I verified manually with the API.

• Possible Order By Options

I used UPDATED_AT as a proxy for MERGED_AT since I filter for states: MERGED in the query. The full script can be found at the end of the blog.