🔎 Main Branch: The One Where Code Reviews Got Actually Better

Hiya friends,

It’s now December. I’m freaking out - this year is basically done! You know the moment when a feature ships and you immediately think, “Why didn’t this exist ages ago?” That’s the Files Changed tab redesign. It’s not flashy or agentic, but if you spend any time staring at diffs, you are gonna care about this.

🚢 What shipped

In GitHub.com PRs batch apply suggested changes

You know that thing where you get 40 review suggestions and have to commit them one by one? Done. Batch them, confirm once, move on. Shaves real time off code review.

See the PR description without leaving the tab

Click “Overview.” The description appears. You don’t scroll, don’t tab-hop, don’t lose your place. Context and code in the same view.

Copilot groups your changes (if you’ve got Pro/Enterprise)

Big PRs get organized into related chunks - refactors here, config there, tests over there. Suddenly a 200-line PR is scannable.

Collapse the noise

CI warnings, comments, annotations - collapse them all. Code comes back into focus. And the best part is that it’s actually fast(erish). The old interface was a bit sluggy on big PRs. This one feels smoother. The public preview is live. Click “Try the new experience” at the top of your Files Changed tab to give it a go.

🎬 What I’m watching

Pluribus - Apple T.V.

Rhea Seehorn plays Carol, a sci-fi author immune to an event that merged humanity into one collective consciousness. Everyone’s connected, content, problem-solved. Carol’s the holdout refusing to join. It’s not scary because it’s evil…it’s scary because the hive just wants her to be happy 😳.

Worth your time if: Like me you enjoy a good sci-fi and are thinking/concerned about AI, autonomy, and the cost of perfect optimization.

🔧 What I’m using

CodeRabbit + Copilot code review

I’ve been running both on PRs this week and they complement each other perfectly. CodeRabbit gives me the context - what changed, why it matters, effort estimate. Copilot finds the bugs that would break at runtime. One understands intent, one catches trap doors. Together it clicks. Loving the shorter distance between reviewing and actually shipping.

✨ This week

I took two days for Thanksgiving 🦃, had a house full of family, and got deep in Pluribus. The irony of finding peace in a show about resisting the hive mind isn’t lost on me. By the time you read this I’ll be in Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent - come by the GitHub booth and say hi if you’re there.

That’s it. Code review fundamentals that actually work.

Forward this to your team if it was useful. Reply and tell me what you actually want to read about if it wasn’t.

With gratitude, I’ll see you next week,

Andrea

P.S. - Thank you for reading. I’ll never take your time for granted.