Pull Requests — What and Why
PRs as conversation, not just merge mechanism, and the GitHub PR workflow that every developer needs to know
You've been working on a feature branch. Your AI agent helped you build something solid. The tests pass. It works locally. Time to merge it into main.
You could just run git merge locally and push. But if you do, you're skipping the most valuable part of the development process.
A pull request isn't just a merge mechanism. It's a conversation. It's a checkpoint. It's the moment where code gets reviewed, discussed, and improved before it becomes permanent. Even if you're working solo, pull requests are worth the extra step.
What a Pull Request Actually Is
A pull request (PR) is a request to merge changes from one branch into another. On GitHub, it creates a page where you can:
- See exactly what changed (the diff)
- Write a description explaining the changes
- Discuss speci
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