April 2, 2026
Pulls, pitches, and pitchforks
Reinventing the Pull Request
Smarter code reviews? Fans nod, critics yell “ad” and “don’t build before approval”
TLDR: Lubeno touts “stacked” tiny reviews to help teams understand code better, not just fix bugs. The crowd split: some praised test-first structure and commit hygiene, while others blasted slow page loads, slammed it as a sales pitch, and warned that building on unapproved changes invites chaos.
Lubeno’s big idea: make code reviews about learning the system, not just hunting bugs. They’re pitching “stacked” pull requests—tiny, story-like changes you can review one by one—plus tools like Jujutsu to rewrite commits cleanly, all to shrink “comprehension debt” (the gap between code written and code your team actually understands). Sounds tidy… until the comments lit up.
The loudest roast? Speed. Shank timed the blog and declared it a slow-mo slideshow—complaining it “took 4.85 seconds to get meaningful content,” alleging big images and no global content network. Suddenly the debate wasn’t just how to review code, but how to load the page. Meanwhile, process purists and pragmatists clashed: epage liked the balance—grouping changes into reviewable chunks and front-loading tests—while petcat dropped the cold-water take: building on changes before they’re accepted is a recipe for rework and wasted hours. And looming over it all, lapcat called it what they saw: a glossy ad for a paid tool.
Still, not everyone was cranky. siruwastaken cheered the “edit history, then lock it” workflow—Jujutsu got a cameo nod (jj)—and a few readers vibed with the “learn the codebase” angle, echoing Addy Osmani’s and Paul Graham’s “think away from keyboard” themes. Verdict? The tech pitch was stacked like the PRs—but the hot takes were stacked higher.
Key Points
- •Lubeno introduces code review improvements focused on reducing comprehension debt, not just catching bugs.
- •The article advocates small, self-contained changes and commit histories that tell a clear story.
- •Git’s append-only workflow is cited as a barrier to clean commit histories; Jujutsu is presented as a tooling fix.
- •Lubeno supports stacked pull requests by detecting dependencies and showing each PR as a diff against its parent for independent review.
- •Review priorities include examining tests and dependency changes first (section partially provided).