In the lock.yml you can specify to not leave a comment upon locking. See https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/blob/master/.github/lock.yml as an example.

We did this yesterday.

Sorry for the email spam folks! I completely misjudged how long the bot would take to catch up to the ridiculous amount of closed old issues on the tracker, due to rate limits. If it's any comfort, I had to face the same spam. 🙂

If there are any concerns other than email spam, please comment on https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/6563 and not here.

Thanks,

Pradyun