people have been talking about this: are pull requests dead? so it got me thinking

what are pull requests for?

• establish chain-of-custody for code changes - this is important for compliance, the ability to link a commit to an author in a way that’s reasonably tamper-proof - what happens when approvals become perfunctory? agents write the code, other agents review the code
  • a place for CI to run
    • what artifacts are really left anyway? and does anyone really check if CI passed or failed on historical commits?
  • a place for merges to be queued
    • limited to open source and enterprise

github actions are bad

• litany of complaints - uptime - yaml - not portable - supply chain sus - can’t run them locally

can we replace it all with agents?

• github works because it’s centralized. lots of jobs to be done: - validate author identity - keep track of proposed changes - run tests - review code - merge when ready - trigger events in external environments - deploy hooks, etc
  • it’s a decently big system!
    • the agentic version might look a bit different — a agent learns about your branch, runs checks, evaluates code quality, discusses the changes, creates build artifacts, deploys to preview environments, and finally merges into main
    • centralization no longer a strict requirement, but you’ll need to figure out attestation