We’ve been building our own Review Pipeline, including automated review guides, risk detection and much more.
There’s SO much to be done around Code Review, I’m very surprised GitHub isn’t doing more.
They have the reach already, they have years of real review data. And yet, the PR itself is not using any of the newly available methods for more efficient review.
Agents are hammering PRs out left and right, and yet here I am still staring at the raw diff of 35 PRs and end up being called the bottleneck.
Code review is a problem only because it is a backstop for everything else. We skip architecture review, we skip prototyping, we one-shot a result in isolation from our team and then expect a human at the end of the line to do our job for us??
Code review is great if the code isn't a surprise, the architecture was already agreed on, the AI reviewers are already happy, and you just need a final pass.
Code review was already terrible before AI if you were slopping down weeks of work on a poor teammate to sift through.
I tell the younger engineers at my company the same thing today I said 5 and 10 years ago. Make the review easy for another engineer to do it, and they'll do it. Make it hard on them, and you won't ship shit.
Working on autonomous development with agents and no human code review. The future is human oversight, without humans in the loop. A PR centric cycle is like being in a factory and standing next to a conveyor belt of PRs. Humans can't possibly review properly. They have to take a few steps back and start looking at the entire machine, evaluating the system as a whole.
Idk, I just ask my agent what the status of the PR is in terms of failing checks, outstanding comments, etc.
But this seems fine
If anything I think the place to invest a better UX is on reviewing code, even “my” (agent’s) own code before I ask for a review. In a world where we’re moving away from IDEs, and using terminal apps or desktop apps to code, I often don’t even see the code until it’s on GitHub. But I still cling on to some semblance of needing to review, in particular what’s important.
And yes, me one year ago would be shocked at what I just said.
I wish they would instead focus on fixing the regressions with PRs first...
For example: There is a nasty bug that got introduced recently where you click "Merge when ready" but your chances of things actually going to the merge queue seem to be only at about 60-70%. When it happens the way you usually find out if things still aren't merged the next day.
Their support has acknowledged the issue to us over a month ago but no fix as of now.
Same. What’s even worse is that there is no visibility into it.
Became so bad for us that we switched to an external merge queue provider (trunk.io, not affiliated)
P90 of merge queue entry _started_ dropped from up to 40! minutes to 16 seconds. And it’s the same underlying mechanism, creating a branch and running CI on it.
Just the other day my teammate approved my PR and despite the repo having that merge when ready feature enabled, it kept not working and throwing some random error.
IIRC we unapproved it, approved without that enabled, and then manually merged it.
Their workflow scheduler is broken too. I noticed that workflows were getting scheduled hours late or not at all, so I had my own workflow orchestrator trigger them.
Publication of a completely unrelated article while another team is failing to fix that bug is a side effect of the company having more than one employee.
Companies with more than one person also have the issue that people don't communicate 100% of what's going on. This means prioritization is imperfect so they often do things other than what you'd like them to. Also you'll find different cultures which differently emphasize fixes and new work.
Hope you're not having too bad of a week whule your bug persists.
But at the same time, do they still hide/mask/minimize review comments when there are more than 10 in a row?
That is the worst with their UX currently, only challenged by the stupidity of the code diff page that hide the most modified files so you can easily miss them and it is impossible to do a ctrl+f search on the page.
Been using Graphite all year. I had trouble adapting my GitHub mind to it at first and I still don’t love everything about Graphite, but _wow_ is Graphite’s PR review page organized better than GitHub. GitHub’s new PR stack is superior (atomic merges are life-changing) and having one fewer tokens to manage CLI to install is fantastic, but I’m still mostly Graphite because the page is just organized better.
Specifically, graphite wins on:
- I land on the page and immediately see an overview of my whole PR stack: what’s in the stack, what’s passing, what’s failing, what’s draft, unresolved and total comments. I know exactly where to spend my time. GitHub PR stacks offer no such convenience.
- Description is below stack details, then code, and I never have to switch tabs or pages. This hierarchy makes sense: top of the page is broad whole stack details, and as we go down we get more specific. GitHub forces me to jump between pages to see all of this.
- Comments in a drawer are nice. Being able to quickly scan them helps me get a sense of what’s there, who’s commenting, I can jump between them quickly.
- Approval, request, labels, etc are also logically oriented at the top near other metadata. GitHub sprawls this around the page. It’s especially rough on mobile browser.
I just checked the new overview. It’s a step up. Curious to see if it helps the PR stack experience. I’d love to fully migrate off Graphite, the non-atomic merge is truly a nightmare across a large stack, but at the end of the day I haven’t been able to give up the UX gains of managing my work on Graphite compared to GitHub.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that GitHub seems very ok with having careless and obvious AI generated text in their public posts. It’s sad.
I wonder, do they not notice? Do they not think we do? Do they not care about the quality of their copy? If not, why on earth would anyone conclude that they care more about the product? There is so much evidence that they do not care, this is yet another piece of data to add to the pile.
Again, it’s just so sad that a company which used to be justifiably beloved has become so miserable and incompetent.
NGL, I know GH gets a lot of shit about the stability, that's well deserved, but they've been really doing nice UI improvements recently. Hopefully this is a new trend that will also continue with the stability.
I tried it this morning, I guess it's for business rather than open source? The first PR I opened was slop that violated the project's policies. The new UI is missing both report and block.
There's not really any improvement to the core problem with PRs. You still have to read up and down the entire comments tab and then again the entire diff tab (hunting and clicking each "load more" and re-opening every "resolved" thread to find invisible replies) to reconstruct the timeline of what's happened in your head because nothing's in temporal order and there's still no interdiff.
> As people need to review more and more pull requests, time spent scrolling adds up
I can’t believe people would write this as the justification. You can press PgDn on your keyboard a few times or just End once to go to the bottom. If you are on a MacBook and your keyboard doesn’t have these keys, press Fn-Down instead of PgDn and Fn-Right instead of End. When done, use the opposite keys (PgUp/Home/Fn-Up/Fn-Left). I have never once found that scrolling takes too much time.
Shovel manufacturer responds to complaints about customers throwing piles of manure in neighbors’ yards: “We’re trialing a free window cleaning service to help you get a clearer view of the manure”
These were not really my beef with the PR review page. My beef is that the first round of PR comments becomes unmoored from ground truth after any subsequent commits, making it difficult to see whether comments were addressed, and how.
Can you fix the inbox first please before reinventing more UI? The inbox is utterly broken and slow. It frequently says my PRs are waiting for review when they’ve already been approved.
There’s SO much to be done around Code Review, I’m very surprised GitHub isn’t doing more.
They have the reach already, they have years of real review data. And yet, the PR itself is not using any of the newly available methods for more efficient review.
Agents are hammering PRs out left and right, and yet here I am still staring at the raw diff of 35 PRs and end up being called the bottleneck.
At least for me. Am I missing something?
Code review is great if the code isn't a surprise, the architecture was already agreed on, the AI reviewers are already happy, and you just need a final pass.
Code review was already terrible before AI if you were slopping down weeks of work on a poor teammate to sift through.
I tell the younger engineers at my company the same thing today I said 5 and 10 years ago. Make the review easy for another engineer to do it, and they'll do it. Make it hard on them, and you won't ship shit.
Working on autonomous development with agents and no human code review. The future is human oversight, without humans in the loop. A PR centric cycle is like being in a factory and standing next to a conveyor belt of PRs. Humans can't possibly review properly. They have to take a few steps back and start looking at the entire machine, evaluating the system as a whole.
https://github.com/pullboard-dev/pullboard
But this seems fine
If anything I think the place to invest a better UX is on reviewing code, even “my” (agent’s) own code before I ask for a review. In a world where we’re moving away from IDEs, and using terminal apps or desktop apps to code, I often don’t even see the code until it’s on GitHub. But I still cling on to some semblance of needing to review, in particular what’s important.
And yes, me one year ago would be shocked at what I just said.
Their support has acknowledged the issue to us over a month ago but no fix as of now.
Became so bad for us that we switched to an external merge queue provider (trunk.io, not affiliated)
P90 of merge queue entry _started_ dropped from up to 40! minutes to 16 seconds. And it’s the same underlying mechanism, creating a branch and running CI on it.
IIRC we unapproved it, approved without that enabled, and then manually merged it.
Companies with more than one person also have the issue that people don't communicate 100% of what's going on. This means prioritization is imperfect so they often do things other than what you'd like them to. Also you'll find different cultures which differently emphasize fixes and new work.
Hope you're not having too bad of a week whule your bug persists.
That is the worst with their UX currently, only challenged by the stupidity of the code diff page that hide the most modified files so you can easily miss them and it is impossible to do a ctrl+f search on the page.
Specifically, graphite wins on:
- I land on the page and immediately see an overview of my whole PR stack: what’s in the stack, what’s passing, what’s failing, what’s draft, unresolved and total comments. I know exactly where to spend my time. GitHub PR stacks offer no such convenience.
- Description is below stack details, then code, and I never have to switch tabs or pages. This hierarchy makes sense: top of the page is broad whole stack details, and as we go down we get more specific. GitHub forces me to jump between pages to see all of this.
- Comments in a drawer are nice. Being able to quickly scan them helps me get a sense of what’s there, who’s commenting, I can jump between them quickly.
- Approval, request, labels, etc are also logically oriented at the top near other metadata. GitHub sprawls this around the page. It’s especially rough on mobile browser.
I just checked the new overview. It’s a step up. Curious to see if it helps the PR stack experience. I’d love to fully migrate off Graphite, the non-atomic merge is truly a nightmare across a large stack, but at the end of the day I haven’t been able to give up the UX gains of managing my work on Graphite compared to GitHub.
I wonder, do they not notice? Do they not think we do? Do they not care about the quality of their copy? If not, why on earth would anyone conclude that they care more about the product? There is so much evidence that they do not care, this is yet another piece of data to add to the pile.
Again, it’s just so sad that a company which used to be justifiably beloved has become so miserable and incompetent.
The GitHub review page is very frustrating navigating around to different tabs.
There's not really any improvement to the core problem with PRs. You still have to read up and down the entire comments tab and then again the entire diff tab (hunting and clicking each "load more" and re-opening every "resolved" thread to find invisible replies) to reconstruct the timeline of what's happened in your head because nothing's in temporal order and there's still no interdiff.
I can’t believe people would write this as the justification. You can press PgDn on your keyboard a few times or just End once to go to the bottom. If you are on a MacBook and your keyboard doesn’t have these keys, press Fn-Down instead of PgDn and Fn-Right instead of End. When done, use the opposite keys (PgUp/Home/Fn-Up/Fn-Left). I have never once found that scrolling takes too much time.
Ugh