It's an unspoken rule that large pull requests are poor etiquette. Traditionally, Agile teams break features into manageable slices to make it easier for developers to tackle the logic and for peers to actually review. That is until the adoption of agents. Now developers are shipping end-to-end features in a fraction of the time, but the result is often an unmanageable wall of code that is discouraging to even open. These "Agent-PRs" almost guarantee a reviewer's eyes will glaze over, leading to a quick "LGTM" that misses subtle logical flaws. This tension has become so high that some open source maintainers have moved to outright banning agent-authored contributions.
Before the invention of pull requests, contributors would email maintainers their code changes or ask maintainers to pull updates from the contributor's repository. In 2008, GitHub introduced pull requests, giving teams a structured way to propose, discuss, and review changes before merging them. For almost two decades, the pull request provided the perfect workflow. But now the very structure that enabled collaboration is cracking under the weight of AI-generated velocity.
Prominent open source developers, such as Rémi Verschelde and Jeff Geerling, have taken to social media to express their concerns.
