Difficulty in thoroughly reviewing large pull requests (PRs) under high pressure to release code quickly

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 5 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “great article. Besides the source control stuff, I found this very interesting (and matches my experience with agentic coding in general, now we'll see until hiring pipelines will take this kind of skillset into account). I am not sure however how easy it is to review 30k PRs/day even if only for intent, and how one can easily notice if the model is taking shortcuts on implementing said intent without reading the code... --- Engineers are no less valuable, but their work is changing. All of the engineers who worked on this system would now rate Claude as better at writing code than them. But our engineers still supplied the invaluable understanding of the high-level inter-system components and the design-level tradeoffs, making informed choices around the problems we wanted to solve and the scale we knew we needed to achieve. Very often, we found that the role of the engineers was to tell Claude “no.” Agents will sometimes violate core system constraints to satisfy a pattern that should never have been allowed in the first place. This was particularly common in our migration. For example, there were multiple systems that tried to brute force looking up when a change merge”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “As AI has become the primary tool for writing the code, I'm starting to see a surge in PR reviews on a daily basis. On top of that there is super high pressure from the business to go live which makes reviewing the PR thoroughly even more difficult. Another key insight I see is that the size of the PR has also increased a lot thanks to all the comments and documentation and documentation around tests etc. A couple of weeks back, I had merged a production PR that had 48k line change spread across 180+ files. I was nervous to the core but the pressure to release was very high. I feel guilty of making such large changes (that too on a Friday!) as I find it difficult to keep the obligation of providing a reliable service to my existing user base. But I find often, I'm left with very little choice. The more I speak to people from the industry, the more I hear stories similar to mine. I want to understand as a community how is everyone dealing with the impending PR apocalypse?”

  Hacker News · frustration