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Shipping faster with small PRs

Why shrinking pull requests improved our review cycle, reduced regressions, and made onboarding easier — without sacrificing velocity.

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Large pull requests feel productive: you finish a whole feature in one go. In practice, they stall in review, hide risky changes, and discourage honest feedback.

I now aim for one coherent change per PR: a refactor, a bugfix, or a slice of a feature — never all three. Reviews stay under fifteen minutes, and CI failures point to a narrow diff.

The habit that helped most was writing the PR description before coding: what changes, why now, and how to verify. If that paragraph gets long, the change is probably too big.