The PR review meeting usually starts with good intentions: reviews are stalling, so put everyone in a room and clear the queue. It works once. Then it becomes a standing meeting whose real function is hiding that reviews are still stalling everywhere else.
Reviews stall for structural reasons — nobody knows it's their turn, the PR is too big to start, and waiting is invisible. A meeting fixes none of those. A system does. Here's one you can set up in an afternoon.
1. Cap the size of a PR before you cap review time
A 1,200-line diff doesn't get reviewed; it gets skimmed and approved. The single highest-leverage rule is a soft cap: if a PR is over ~400 lines of diff, it gets split or it gets a written reason in the description. Reviewers may still decline a monster on sight — that's the point. Size limits are what make "review within a day" a plausible promise instead of a fantasy.
2. Make the queue visible, not verbal
