Kurzer Check
Guess first, no penalty. An agent opens a pull request for "add CSV export" with 1,900 changed lines across 31 files. What's the best first move?
A pull request, or PR, is a request to merge a set of changes into the main code, so teammates can review it first. AI makes big PRs cheap to produce. They're not cheap to review, and a reviewer facing 1,900 lines tends to approve and hope.
Keep AI pull requests small, with one job each. Then reject anything in them that doesn't belong:
- Changes nobody asked for: reformatting whole files, renames, "while I was here" fixes.
- New dependencies (outside packages) that weren't agreed.
- Tests that got weaker: deleted, skipped, or with looser checks.
- Lines the author can't explain. If you opened the PR, that includes you.
A good PR description tells the reviewer where to look hardest. Saying what the AI got wrong isn't a confession. It's evidence that a person read the code.