So what do you think of Discord rewriting in rust, and AWS shipping an emulator that was ai generated? Do you think those were done with small prs? Do you think that it's bad they did those things?

Please add your own thoughts to the conversation rather than aggressively asking rhetorical questions. "Counterexamples exist" is hardly a valid criticism of another human's perspective.

If someone says PRs need to be small, and I say here are some examples of huge PRs that I think are good, do you think these are still bad? That is not remotely invalid.

Where did grey-area say they need to be small. As in an absolute? They didn't, you just assumed that's what they meant and then went off the rails in your response.

The first 4 words? "Just ban large prs." A ban is pretty absolute language. He would have banned my example PRs clearly. Or maybe he wouldn't which is why I asked about them as examples. Because that is the obvious follow up. If you ban large PRs what are you losing? You're loosing big swing aggressive efforts to make sweeping progress.

[delayed]

It's like responding to "you should wear a seatbelt, statistically they keep you safer in a crash" with "here are two people who got in a crash without a seatbelt and survived"

I think they could do those things with small PRs if they chose. If their agents are not intelligent enough to make small prs, I guess they can YOLO and assume everything is just fine with what the agents did. I do think small PRs would be better for agent review as well though, because they avoid any problems with context being overwhelmed and things being missed/forgotten.

What are the PRs you're thinking of?

You're welcome to do large PRs, I'm not a fan of huge PRs though and would not pretend to review them (as pretending is what it would be), nor would I like to work somewhere where this is the culture.

I, personally, would certainly argue that those should be done in small PRs. If you have a working application and want to rewrite in rust, I would expect it to be done by replacing individual components one at a time while making sure relevant tests keep passing. If you're making a new application, I would expect it to be built incrementally by adding parts incrementally.

Yeah, if you ended up doing it as a single massive PR how can you ever be sure that existing functionality was preserved?

Discord's rewrite took 5+ years. Yes they probably used small PRs

Fully agree with a twist - ban dumb large PRs.

To add to my openspec shilling above, I've been known to "fix" large PRs by reverse engineering specs from them and building each spec out in a separate PR.

Last week me and a coworker turned a 15k line PR into 10 x 1.5k line ones that went in smoothly.

Yes I do like to make a big pr first sometimes but then it's usually pretty easy to split it into small ones and it's a helpful process in many ways.