We replaced a role with AI, and our developers love it

AI-aided development tools are churning out more lines of code than ever, presenting a challenge for reviewers who must review ever larger pull requests. After toying with the idea of closing the door to AI-aided code submissions, GitHub is now looking to help enterprises manage big code changes in a more incremental way. It says a new feature, Stacked PRs, can improve the speed and quality of code reviews by breaking large changes into smaller units. “Large pull requests are hard to review, slow to merge, and prone to conflicts. Reviewers lose context, feedback quality drops, and the whole team slows down,” the company said, announcing GitHub Stacked PRs on its website. With the new, stacked approach it aims to reduce the overhead of managing dependent pull requests by minimizing rebasing effort, improving continuous integration (CI) and policy visibility across stacked changes, and preserving review context to enhance code quality. Stacked PRs tracks how requests in a stack relate to

Generative AI has revolutionized the space of software development in such a way that developers can now write code at an unprecedented speed. Various tools such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer and ChatGPT have become a normal part of how engineers carry out their work nowadays. I have experienced this firsthand, in my roles from leading engineering teams at Amazon to working on large-scale platforms for invoicing and compliance, both the huge boosts in productivity and the equally great risks that come with GenAI-assisted development. With GenAI, the promise of productivity is very compelling. Developers who use AI coding assistants talk about their productivity going up by 15% to 55%. But most of the time, this speed comes with hidden dangers. To name a few, AI-generated software without good guardrails could open up security issues, lead to technical debt and introduce bugs that are difficult to detect through traditional code reviews. According to McKinsey research, while G