“Pull requests of a couple thousand lines of code, who can manage that? I think it is getting out of the cognitive capacity of people to review all those pull requests. Things are getting into production that are not really that well reviewed and are causing issues on the other side.”
Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Context
The host asked whether the post-pull-request world is becoming the harder part of engineering. Fabijan says AI is making pull requests bigger and more frequent, against the continuous-integration practice of shipping small changes to limit blast radius.
Transcript
…So there are like a couple of forces that are just very new and things are breaking in various shapes and forms. Yeah, I would not say only in the production and operations, but kind of also in the society a little bit. It's just the velocity and the amount of things that we're putting out there.
Is the post-PR world becoming the harder part of engineering? Or you had mentioned the social part as well, but like what is like becoming harder specifically from the changes with AI?
I would say, I mean, operation side of things is becoming, you know, harder. So if I'm just thinking from these, you know, numbers perspective. So the complexity in the software is increasing just by the numbers of lines of code that are being put out there. The frequency of those deliveries is increasing. I mean, in the good old, you know, CI CD practice, continuous, you know, integration as a practice is you want to ship small chunks of changes because then you minimize the blast radius, you minimize the surface area. Now the pull requests are just bigger. It's getting kind of out of hand. You know, what's the size of the thing that we are shipping? I mean, I'm seeing it in, you know, in our team and I'm hearing it all over the place. You know, those pull requests of couple of thousands of lines of code, you know, who can manage that? And I think that, I mean, it's not, I think it is getting out of, you know, cognitive capacity of people to just review all those pull requests. And it's just that, you know, things are getting into production that are not really…
I've seen this in my day job as well. Like we have AI Agents Like code using clogged code or cursor or whatever. And then you have AI Agents Like code. Like you have like a codex plug-in on maybe GitHub that reviews the PR. And then you have maybe even AI in your CI-CD pipeline, like in your actual…
Well, one way we can reduce it or solve it by having like more AI, but it takes time to figure out how exactly and where to put that AI. So in terms of like unsolved problems, it's definitely the right access to production systems. So people are not really into that at scale. There are some people…
So policy enforcement, that sort of thing. Yeah. Or at least privilege.