"Yes, you're right to push back on that."
Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#52If the whole thing is really all or nothing (very rare), at least break it up into sensible commits that can be reviewed individually.
If it can be broken into commits it's not all or nothing is it :)
You could allow commits in the same PR that must all go together, and then squash them before you merge
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then reject them for being incomprehensible? Look, if you don't think code review is worthwhile, don't do it. Just give everybody unfettered permission to merge. But don't pretend to do review if you're not trying to maintain some standard of quality.
I do think code review is worthwhile, not sure how you read that from my comment. A cap on PR size isn't inherently going to make an LLM do a good job of segmenting PRs. It requires careful prompting or manual action, the kind of effort typically exerted by people who already cared enough not to hit such a cap. You may as well just ditch the cap, to save yourself from having to reject a series of PRs rather than just…
is there a reason why there's no standardization in orgs in terms of skills/harnesses/etc for AI-assisted development? for example, a rule of 'you must invoke ABC skill that contains all of the context for this part of the codebase if you plan on making changes there' with the codeowning team dedicated to maintaining it both for their own use and for the use of other teams that have up or downstream dependencies
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#54Paginate atomic commit diffs
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, sometimes I don’t know how I want to write something until I’m finished. Huge refactors are often like this. So, just like you said, rewrite the whole thing, THEN break it apart into bite size chunks that tell the story and feed it to others with acceptable and reasonable context. It’s a skill that engineers need, and it pays dividends to all on the team, including you, when your coworkers ALSO start doing th…
> sometimes I don’t know how I want to write something until I’m finished This is knowledge that goes back to the beginning of software development - "Plan to throw [version] one away". I think this could potentially become a good practice. LLMs make it so easy and cheap to just get it working and build that v1. Then you can play around with it and see if works and read the code about what could be better. Throw away…
This is the first time I've heard a use for LLMs that I think might be good.
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#56Apparently I'm in the minority, but if a single chunk of functionality legitimately needs a thousand lines of code, I'd rather see it all up front than have to review 5 separate PRs that don't do anything until they're combined.
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#57I really believe people who publish huge slop PRs (short of being fired) should have their tokens taxed on the basis that it's an unpriced cost on the colleagues and the firm
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Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#58In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits. They lack the ability to sequence work and understand dependencies efficiently enough to manage it – it's not that they can't do small PRs, it's that doing them takes vastly more resources which then hits context limits etc. And if you want to then go back and edit a stack of commits or PRs, rebasing work into the middle,…
Most professional software developers (probably including you) never do any work that could legitimately be described as engineering. And that's fine because most software isn't very important anyway. There's very little software that requires true engineering practices. The exceptions are in domains like avionics and medical devices.
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#59In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits. They lack the ability to sequence work and understand dependencies efficiently enough to manage it – it's not that they can't do small PRs, it's that doing them takes vastly more resources which then hits context limits etc. And if you want to then go back and edit a stack of commits or PRs, rebasing work into the middle,…
I can't be happier seeing how many posts are about AI making PR terrorists unhappy. They can no longer bully their teammates so they rant about it here
Re: Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant
#60Y'all need to try PR review tools that split PRs into chapters. Stage was the best product in this space, but Linear Review has it, Graphite has it, and some other tools too. You get the full contexts while each piece is still reviewable individually.