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Ask HN: Do pull requests have value?

A Hacker News discussion thread explores whether human-reviewed pull requests provide value in corporate development environments, with commenters debating their effectiveness for code quality, collaboration, and process overhead.

Background

- A **pull request (PR)** is a developer's proposed code change submitted for review by teammates before it is merged into the main project. The practice is standard in companies using Git-based platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. - The poster is asking whether human code review (reading and commenting on each other's PRs) is genuinely useful in a corporate setting, or whether it has become a bureaucratic checkbox that slows teams down without catching real bugs. - This sits inside a long-running debate in software engineering: proponents argue PRs catch mistakes, spread knowledge, and enforce quality standards; critics say they create delays, encourage shallow reviewing, and that pairing or automated testing would be more effective. - The question resonates especially now because many developers suspect PR review has become performative — "looks good to me" rubber-stamping — rather than a meaningful quality gate.

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