Pull requests aren't what they used to be.

A PR used to be a story. Someone planned a thing, broke it into pieces, made a few commits as they figured out the shape of the work, opened a PR, got feedback, iterated. You could read it. You could reason about it. The diff had a narrative.

Now a lot of PRs land as one commit, a couple hundred lines touching a handful of files, generated in an afternoon. No plan, no decomposition, just "here's the thing, please review." If you're lucky, the description was written by a human. If you're unlucky, that was generated too.

Generation got a hundred times cheaper, review didn't.

The Metric Trap

Some of what I'm about to say isn't new. Addy Osmani wrote a great piece earlier this year covering a lot of the same territory, with a focus on the practical side: the PR contract, how solo and team workflows diverge, concrete principles for keeping AI review tools useful instead of noisy. If you want the field manual, read his post.…