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Stop Using Pull Requests (a4al6a.substack.com)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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TL;DR

  • Pull requests were designed for open source contributions from untrusted strangers. Applying them to trusted teams is a category error.
  • Peer-reviewed research shows code review’s primary value is knowledge transfer, not bug detection. Less than 15% of review comments relate to actual bugs.
  • Async PR workflows mean your code spends 86-99% of its lead time waiting. One organisation spent 130,000 hours in a single year waiting on PRs that received zero comments.
  • DORA research across 36,000+ professionals shows trunk-based development correlates with dramatically higher software delivery performance, and faster code reviews alone improve performance by 50%.
  • The alternative is T*D: Test-Driven Development (build quality in), Trunk-Based Development (integrate continuously), and Team-focused Development (review during creation, not after).
  • The transition is gradual: optimise PRs first, adopt Ship/Show/Ask, then move to pairing and trunk-based development as trust and automation mature.-
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[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 20 points 3 days ago

Yeah if you saw the quality of my coworkers' code you would not be saying this.

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 6 points 2 days ago

This. I can't get them to run lints or tests on their own, and I can't get the person in charge of the repo to let us run the CI automatically on PR. Combine that with the rampant slop, and a good number of the PRs are just plain unreviewable.

Then you run into the other issue: the PRs get merged too fast to review them properly. How someone approves 50 changed files in a PR with +30000 and -150 lines changed in under an hour is beyond me, to be honest.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago

I can’t get the person in charge of the repo to let us run the CI automatically on PR

Ouch. Time for a new job. (I'm not even joking - I'd quit if it was that bad.)

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 4 points 2 days ago

In this case, it's a customer's environment, so it's actually not one of my direct coworkers that's blocking this. Otherwise I'd agree.

this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
-11 points (39.2% liked)

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