Yet another Hacker News

GitHub New pull request overview page in public preview

40 points xiaoyu2006 1 hour ago 27 comments

capevace 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

greenowl 36 minutes ago | parent

Have an agent do the reviewing?

ivanjermakov 32 minutes ago | parent

Code review process is the worst part of LLM-assisted SDLC at the moment, probably because nobody knows how to do it well yet.

criley2 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

Olscore 27 minutes ago | parent

Yeah man, the PR-centric lifecycle has to change.

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

0c3ca83 23 minutes ago | parent

Just press accept, who cares.

jeffbee 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

varun_chopra 50 minutes ago | parent

> The merge box, distilled

Ugh

gz09 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

leipert 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

spike021 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

esafak 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

cadamsdotcom 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

cedws 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

suralind 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

zahrevsky 40 minutes ago | parent

Discussion: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/212186

rafram 38 minutes ago | parent

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”

ethin 35 minutes ago | parent

I wish that instead of trying to make the UI look pretty GH would instead try to make the platform solid again

ivanjermakov 34 minutes ago | parent

Finally approve button is available on the main screen without having to open diff view which takes ages to load. Still two clicks though.

verst 28 minutes ago | parent

I've been using this for a few weeks but I don't quite like it. It's too many clicks to navigate to the PR discussion / comments for my liking.

ghthor 3 minutes ago | parent

I haven’t tried the new view, it I really like the graphite review page, everything is on one page.

The GitHub review page is very frustrating navigating around to different tabs.

cautiouscat 27 minutes ago | parent

Isn't AI generated text in submissions not allowed on HN? Like seriously, they couldn't be bothered to write this?

gedy 17 minutes ago | parent

You need to realize that a lot of end workers are getting pushed to do this by managers to show "efficiency" and toe the line.

semiquaver 8 minutes ago | parent

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? If not, why would anyone conclude that they care 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.

pushcx 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

kccqzy 17 minutes ago | parent

> 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.