Stop Using Pull Requests
The article critiques the use of pull requests in software development, arguing that they are ill-suited for trusted teams. It highlights that pull requests were designed for open source projects and often lead to inefficiencies and a false sense of quality. The author proposes alternatives like Test-Driven Development and Trunk-Based Development to enhance software quality and team collaboration.
- ▪Pull requests were originally created for open source contributions from untrusted individuals.
- ▪Research indicates that the primary benefit of code reviews is knowledge transfer, not bug detection.
- ▪Asynchronous pull request workflows can cause significant delays, with some organizations spending thousands of hours waiting on unreviewed code.
3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 24 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
Lobsters files mainly under programming. We currently carry 187 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Lobsters |
| Canonical URL | https://a4al6a.substack.com/p/stop-using-pull-requests |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 18:46:32 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T00:01:36.523Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T00:01:36.523Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wOyrufjq0jPf · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Stop Using Pull RequestsYour team’s code review process is probably an expensive illusion of quality. Here’s what the evidence says, and what to do instead.Andrea LaforgiaMar 19, 202622719Share“Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.”-- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (1982)AbstractPull requests have become the default code review mechanism in software teams everywhere. But the pull request was invented for open source projects, where strangers contribute code to repositories maintained by people who don’t know them.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lobsters.
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