(Adapted from my Lightning talk at Apache Airflow Summit 2026)
For a long time in open source projects like Airflow, the limiting factor for improving the project hasn’t been the amount of people writing code, but the amount of people willing and able to review those changes to make sure they are sensible, high quality, and aligned with the goals of the project. In the age of AI, that problem has been supercharged, and now not only of the largest open source projects, but essentially every repo at every organization is receiving a deluge of pull requests of dubious quality. That means we all need to be working to make the reviewer’s job as easy as possible, even when it demands more time from us as the author.
Remember that when you are opening a PR and asking for review, you are making request for the time and effort of a fellow human being, which I believe is a sacred act. In the past, you earned your claim on that time with every keystroke you spent writing the code. You had put in effort that was greater than what you were asking your reviewer for. Now that social contract is broken. Spending a couple bucks on tokens does not entitle you to anyone else’s precious review time. You have to do more. Write a really good PR description, explain not just what you were doing, but why, what alternatives you considered, and why this is aligned with the project goals. Anticipate objections and answer them in advance. Show that you value the reviewer’s time, and that looking at your PR will be a worthwhile investment.
As a former mechanical engineer, I like to quote one of the principles of manufacturing, which is that the only place an overall process can be improved is at the bottleneck; “improvements” elsewhere are wasteful. In today’s environment where the bottleneck is firmly the review process, that means that helping you get a PR up faster is counterproductive if it makes the reviewer’s job even a tiny bit harder.
Putting a demand on another person’s time gets to the heart of core human values of respect, kindness, and seeing the fundamental value in other people. We owe each other more than what I am seeing out there. Let’s be better.