Yesterday I asked “What would it take to trust the system enough to not require pull requests?”.

I got a lot of responses on LinkedIn.

But you know what?

Almost nobody answered the question. Or even tried to.

The vast majority of comments were defending pull requests.

Now it’s fine to defend pull requests if you want to. But the whole point was to challenge the conventional wisdom, and think of creative solutions. I guess this just goes to show that such exercises are even more needed than I realized!

Here’s a typical exchange:

Pull requests provide a great opportunity for learning and teaching!

Okay. Let’s say that we agree… this isn’t an answer to my question. So let’s try once more:

What would need to happen to realize the benefits of this great learning and teaching opportunity (or whatever other benefit of PRs you see) without pull requests?