Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics
Rootly has abandoned its 'small pull request' policy, citing that AI-generated code is better reviewed as complete features rather than incremental diffs. The company has developed an internal AI tool to assess the risk and impact of these larger code changes.
Why it matters
This shift highlights how AI is fundamentally changing software engineering workflows and traditional best practices for code quality and review.
InfoQ Homepage News Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics
In the post, Rootly co-founder and CTO Quentin Rousseau explains that for two years, it enforced a strict small-PR culture with stacked PRs and atomic changes limited to a few hundred lines. He states that this made sense when humans wrote code by hand, as smaller diffs were easier to review and revert. He writes that AI agents have changed the equation because they think in features rather than increments, producing complete implementations, including migrations, models, services, controllers, tests, and frontend components, in a single output.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in