Your First Pull Request
The complete open-source workflow in one exercise
Overview
This chapter is a hands-on exercise. By the end of it, you'll have forked a real repository, created a branch, written a review of a book chapter, and submitted a pull request — the standard way open-source contributors propose changes.
This isn't a simulation. Your pull request will show up on GitHub for real people to read.
This is the open-source workflow. Every contribution to every major project in the world follows these same seven steps. You'll have done all of them by the end of this chapter.
— from the exercise
By the end of this exercise.
- ✓Your own fork of The Agentic Crew repository on GitHub
- ✓A new branch with your changes isolated from main
- ✓A written review of a book chapter (your words, your opinions)
- ✓A staged change you read with git diff --staged before committing it
- ✓A pull request submitted to the original project — visible to real people
- ✓Optional: the same flow driven by an agent, from a plan you approved first
Terms you'll learn.
- Repository
- A project folder that Git is tracking — often called a "repo"
- Fork
- Your personal copy of someone else's repository, stored on GitHub
- Branch
- A parallel version of the project where you work without touching the main copy
- Commit
- A saved snapshot of your changes, with a message describing what you did
- Diff
- Exactly which lines you added or removed — read it before every commit
- Pull Request
- A formal request to merge your branch into the original project
- Instruction file
- CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md — notes about the project that an agent reads when it starts
- Untrusted input
- Text you didn't write, which can contain instructions aimed at the agent
Sections in this exercise.
- 01What You'll Need
- 02What's About to Happen
- 03Fork and Clone the Book
- 04Explore the Project
- 05Read Chapter 1
- 06Create a Branch
- 07Write Your Review
- 08The Prompt-First Way
- 09Stage and Commit
- 10Push to Your Fork
- 11Create the Pull Request
- 12What Happens Next
You've just completed the workflow that powers every major open-source project in the world — fork, clone, branch, write, commit, push, pull request. You read your diff before committing, and if you let an agent drive, you approved its plan first. You'll use these habits for the rest of this book.