--- title: Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code... description: Rootly, an incident management platform, has abandoned its long-standing small pull request rule after finding it counterproductive in an AI-agent-driven... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics | daily.dev og:description: Rootly, an incident management platform, has abandoned its long-standing small pull request rule after finding it counterproductive in an AI-agent-driven... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/TOQHY18k9.png og:image:alt: Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics **[InfoQ](https://daily.dev/sources/infoq)** · 5 min read · 1 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Rootly, an incident management platform, has abandoned its long-standing small pull request rule after finding it counterproductive in an AI-agent-driven development workflow. CTO Quentin Rousseau explains that AI agents produce complete feature implementations in single outputs, making stacked PRs create more confusion than clarity. Instead, Rootly now focuses on 'blast radius' — assessing what user-facing behavior breaks if a bug exists — rather than line counts. The company built an internal AI code reviewer that assigns risk assessments, standardisation scores, and severity-grouped findings. Safety has shifted from merge-time to rollout-time via progressive feature flag rollouts. Human reviewers are required to fill in 'Why and What' context sections that AI cannot provide. Industry figures like Patrick Debois have similarly argued that PR-based workflows become anti-patterns at agent speed, and measurable token costs are now making process inefficiencies financially visible. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did Rootly get rid of its small pull request rule? Rootly dropped its small-PR rule because AI agents generate complete features in a single output, including migrations, models, services, controllers, tests, and frontend code, rather than incremental changes. The company found forcing agents into stacked, small PRs produced technically correct but contextually worse reviews, since comments on one PR depended on decisions in another. It now assesses blast radius instead of diff size. _Teams rethinking review processes for AI-generated code can track evolving practices like this on daily.dev._ ### How does Rootly's AI code reviewer assess risk in pull requests? Rootly built an internal AI code reviewer that evaluates every pull request against engineering standards, producing a structured review with a risk assessment, standardisation score, confidence score, and severity-grouped findings. Rather than acting as a human reviewer, it answers one question per PR: if this change has a bug, what user-facing behaviour breaks? It also flags whether changes alter system behaviour versus performance or appearance. _Engineers evaluating AI code review tools can follow approaches like this one on daily.dev._ ### How does Rootly use feature flags to manage risk from AI-generated pull requests? Rootly ships every significant feature behind a feature flag, turned off by default when code merges to production. The real safety check happens during progressive rollout, enabling the feature first for the internal team, then a handful of customers, then 10 percent, then everyone, shifting the safety boundary from merge time to rollout rather than relying on small diff sizes. _Developers weighing feature-flag rollout strategies for AI-generated code can follow these patterns on daily.dev._ ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@rizzdev** · 0 upvotes > So line count was just a lazy proxy for blast radius all along ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [AI Code Review Bottleneck 2026: Why PRs Are Stuck in Review](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-code-review-bottleneck-2026-why-prs-are-stuck-in-review-o7qcycgq0) · Alex CloudStar · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [Agentic Code Review](https://daily.dev/posts/agentic-code-review-0ue8fcsa1) · Addy Osmani · 147 upvotes · 14 comments - [PR reviews were already broken. AI made it worse](https://daily.dev/posts/pr-reviews-were-already-broken-ai-made-it-worse-kco0ab7pd) · LeadDev · 3 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#devops](https://daily.dev/tags/devops), [#code-review](https://daily.dev/tags/code-review), [#agentic-ai](https://daily.dev/tags/agentic-ai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9"},"datePublished":"2026-08-07T08:01:24.025Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T07:53:17.621Z","description":"Rootly, an incident management platform, has abandoned its long-standing small pull request rule after finding it counterproductive in an AI-agent-driven...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/c7ebecc9d3a7def838f7c38b4c13e50f?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/c7ebecc9d3a7def838f7c38b4c13e50f?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"InfoQ","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"InfoQ","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/afc3bced3e1e4b188dd9127017a60e0c","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/infoq"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"devops,code-review,agentic-ai","timeRequired":"PT5M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"InfoQ","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/infoq"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Rootly Drops Small PR Rule as Agentic AI Changes Code Review Economics"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"So line count was just a lazy proxy for blast radius all along","datePublished":"2026-08-07T20:06:15.743Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/TOQHY18k9#c-ZfNf5NTXg","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Andrew","url":"https://daily.dev/rizzdev","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--35vRfXAA--/f_auto/v1785413727/avatars/avatar_fQ7ttCKtPuu6tDvcgQXv5?_a=BAMAMicg0"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/rootly-drops-small-pr-rule-as-agentic-ai-changes-code-review-economics-toqhy18k9#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"Why did Rootly get rid of its small pull request rule?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Rootly dropped its small-PR rule because AI agents generate complete features in a single output, including migrations, models, services, controllers, tests, and frontend code, rather than incremental changes. 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