pull requests for everything

Nowadays it’s common to see developers juggling multiple claude codes (or codex, or aider, or …) AI has woven itself into coding workflows because developers dog‑food the tools that help them build software, so those tools tend to evolve the fastest.

But I assert we have another big advantage: we have pull requests (“PRs”) and change tracking.

For those unfamiliar: When you change code you don’t just hit “Save” like on a spreadsheet. You package the changes into a “diff,” open a pull request on GitHub, and let the platform stage the diff. Team members review the changes and tools run automated tests. Then you edit, reject, or merge the change. This workflow gives you:

• parallelism: multiple branches can be open simultaneously, each representing a different line of development
• safety: changes are isolated until approval, and can be easily (well, most of the time) reverted
• visibility: the history of what was changed, why, and by whom is always available

Now think about an AI agent that’s refactoring code or adding new features. All it needs to do is submit a PR with its changes — the rest of the workflow stays the same. Devs can kick off 10 agents, go make some coffee, and come back to changes that can be reviewed and worked. The system provides natural safety even when the AI goes completely off the rails.

No such conventions exist for other types of knowledge work, e.g. there are no “pull requests” for email subscriber lists or marketing funnels. AI agents in those areas typically write directly into production, or rely on ad‑hoc scripts that lack version control, review, or rollback. So you either:

• let the AI go full yolo: give it unrestricted access, risk coming back to a hole in the ground where your ad campaign used to be, or…
• babysit it: sandbox the AI, constantly monitor, and isolate it from the live system to prevent damage

Both scenarios kind of suck, and I think the lack of PR-style workflows for other knowledge domains will continue to hold back the usefulness of AI systems… at least until someone builds it :)