Small pull requests. Serious engineering
Focused changes, rigorous review, and architectural intent are the foundations of sustained autonomous development.
Give each change a clear job
Substantial product development becomes easier to reason about when each change has a clear purpose. A focused pull request gives a reviewer a manageable question: does this implementation solve the intended problem, fit the system around it, and meet the engineering standards of the repository? The answer needs to account for more than whether the code was generated successfully.
Descant's workflow is built around that discipline. Planning establishes the intended change. Implementation works within that scope. Review examines the result, and feedback becomes work to resolve. Keeping that loop focused helps a sequence of changes preserve architectural intent as the codebase evolves.
Review belongs inside the development loop
Our July work expanded the review performed before a pull request opens, alongside the separate review that follows it. The goal is to bring more scrutiny into the engineering process: catch problems, address findings, and send a better change into the next stage. Different perspectives are valuable when they produce concrete improvements to the implementation.
Review also needs a sense of scope. A finding about the current change deserves an answer in that change. A separate improvement needs its own piece of work. Preserving that distinction keeps review useful and makes the backlog more informative, without allowing a focused task to expand indefinitely.
The standard has to survive the next hundred changes
Production-grade software depends on choices that compound: clear interfaces, sensible boundaries, maintainable implementations, and an understanding of why the system is shaped the way it is. Those choices have to remain visible as more changes arrive. We are building Descant to carry them forward across the software development lifecycle.
For a team, this should mean substantial work can advance under explicit priorities and merge rules while remaining understandable. Small pull requests are one part of that experience. Their real value is the cumulative result: a product that progresses through changes people can inspect and a codebase that remains a good foundation for the work ahead.