Pull requests are an important part of programming culture. They serve multiple purposes and vary across teams, organisations and even technologies. In essence, they reflect how a team constantly evolves, both through its individual members and its code.
They can be used to teach, fix bugs, refactor code, spark new ideas and even make friends through open source.
The question is: how will they evolve in the age of LLMs? It's trivial to create a PR now and even review it. With models like Sol working alongside a senior developer, the whole process can be semi-automated and still result in well-reviewed, high-quality code.
But what about the other aspects surrounding a PR? What about teaching, knowledge transfer, the social aspect, the culture which they help to build?
All of that seems to be gone to some degree when someone opens a PR with 10K+ LoC of changes. It seems PRs will become artefacts of a bygone era.
The way forward is not clear. How do we keep the culture around PRs? How do we keep the human aspect? It will all live in "/agents/*", in Markdown files which slowly evolve.
It seems our culture will live on in Markdown artefacts, at least for now. The PR and its humanity will depend on how much of it is produced by an LLM and how much by the team itself.
We now have to make an effort to stay human because we might lose the culture around these artefacts if we fully replace them with LLM workflows.
How are we going to transfer knowledge, share idioms and help other developers grow if the PR is dead? I remember getting comments on my PRs more than a decade ago, looking up what they meant and reading articles and books just to get better at the craft. That shaped and enlightened me. I would not be the developer I am today without the feedback, the idioms and the culture that PRs helped foster.
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