On The Coattails of Pull Requests

Besides the foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), there are a few standout companies that are on a tear (like actually making money) in this emerging era of AI: Cursor ($100MM in ARR), Windsurf, Bolt ($20 MM ARR in two months), Lovable ($17MM in three months).

These products are successful because they elegantly take advantage of the Pull Request (PR).

The PR is a standard new part of the modern developer workflow, standing on the shoulders of Linus Torvalds’ git, GitHub, creating the “fork-and-pull” workflow. The PR is now ubiquitous in a modern engineering workflow. And I would argue it was one of the most important innovations in developer productivity in my career.

• A PR is a request to merge a logical collection of code changes into a main line of your codebase, allowing for review, discussion, and approval before integration.
• A good PR is self-contained, focused on a single feature or bug fix, and can be reviewed by a team member in a reasonable amount of time.
• Recently, PRs have become one of the cornerstones of SOC2 compliance. Every security policy I’ve read states that one-to-two team members must review a PR before integration.
• The PR is the point in the process where a human engineer needs to stand behind their work and say: “I am proud of what I have done.”
• As engineers, when we picked these coding acceleration tools, we were very comfortable about Gen AI creating code for us, for we knew (as engineers, engineering managers, CISOs, etc.) that there is a natural checkpoint for us to approve that body of work. And, there was very little needed in the way of change management. It is already part of a hardened, established flow.

The PR process is the perfect “Human in the Loop” pattern.

This was a big ah-ha moment for me as I embarked on creating products that leverage Gen AI. Behavior change is always the hardest thing to overcome; these tools were able to weave into an established flow in an incremental and powerful way.

Have you seen other examples where AI has so naturally and impactfully integrated into a workflow?

For more insights and to share your thoughts, follow me on LinkedIn!