What is 20 PRs a day worth to you?
What is a “PR”?
A PR is a “pull request”, a term that was popularized alongside Github’s rise to prominence. When a software engineer wants to make a change to a codebase, they (the author) first creates a pull request with their code change and asks another engineer to review it (the reviewer). This “open PR and review” process helps ensure code quality, correctness (to some extent), and as a way of knowledge sharing between the author and reviewer.
In some places, the number of PRs an engineer creates is used as an indicator for how productive they are. This is widely regarded as misguided by people in the industry, but it is neverhteless a common metric.
Before LLMs or AI, an engineer would create around 1-2 PRs a day.
With LLMs, opening 20 PRs in a day is now a very common occurence. This is obviously a very empowering feeling. But that feeling comes at a cost. This website aims to collect those costs.
Why single out software engineers?
AI has undoubtedly affected other fields, likely with a similar story as engineers and their PRs. Although this website is software engineering focused, don’t forget other workers in other fields are also making the same decisions every day.
Software engineers are also worth singling out because the whole AI industry relies on them, both in running and maintaining the infrastructure, and as their biggest revenue source in the form of Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.
Quotes
“All this, so people like us (referring to software engineers) can do a job that wasn’t that hard in the first place, and in reality was actually quite comfortable, for employers who are promising to lay us off, for productivity gains that aren’t even measurable.” – anonymous