● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportMedium impact1 neutral
Rootly Alters Code Review Process, Drops Small PR Rule Due to AI-Generated Code
Key points
- Rootly dropped its small PR rule after two years.
- AI agents generate most of Rootly's code, producing complete features.
- Small PRs became inefficient for AI-generated code reviews.
- Rootly now uses an internal AI code reviewer and feature flags for safety.
Shift in Code Review Philosophy
Rootly, a provider of incident management platforms, has announced a change in its code review practices. The company has abandoned its long-standing rule requiring small pull requests, a practice it had enforced for two years. This decision stems from the increasing prevalence of AI agents in generating the majority of its codebase.
AI's Impact on Code Generation
Rootly co-founder and CTO Quentin Rousseau explained that the small PR culture, which involved stacked PRs and atomic changes limited to a few hundred lines, was effective when humans manually wrote code. This approach facilitated easier review and reversion. However, AI agents operate differently, generating complete feature implementations, including migrations, models, services, controllers, tests, and frontend components, in a single output. This contrasts with the incremental approach of human developers.
Challenges with Traditional Review for AI Code
Attempts to force AI agents to produce stacked PRs resulted in technically correct but contextually problematic outcomes. Review comments often spanned multiple PRs, complicating the review process for human developers. Rootly concluded that the small PR rule, optimized for human writing speed, became an overhead when applied to AI-generated code, as AI removed the constraint of incremental development.
New Review Process and Safety Measures
In response, Rootly developed an internal AI code reviewer. This tool assesses every PR against engineering standards, providing a structured review with a risk assessment, standardization score, confidence score, and specific findings grouped by severity. The AI reviewer focuses on identifying potential user-facing impacts if a bug exists, rather than mimicking human review. It flags changes that alter system behavior versus those affecting speed or appearance, assigning appropriate risk profiles to guide human reviewers. Additionally, Rootly now deploys every significant feature behind a feature flag, shifting the safety boundary from the merge stage to the rollout stage.
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Reporting from
Incident management platform Rootly has discontinued its small pull request (PR) rule, citing changes in code generation economics due to AI agents. The company now focuses on assessing "blast radius" and uses feature flags and rollback capabilities for safety, rather than limiting PR size. This shift reflects how AI agents produce complete feature implementations, making traditional small, stacked PRs inefficient for review.