I spend a lot of time helping teams work in smaller batches. Smaller user stories. Smaller features. Smaller pull requests. Smaller commits.

And lately I’ve had some pretty good success with this. A couple dozen lines of code and 3 commits in a single PR is a big improvement over the old status quo of thousands of lines, and dozens of commits.

Then I saw the PR get approved after a short back-and-forth.

Then it sat there.

And sat there.

And it had to be rebased.

Multiple times.

Then it had some conflicts.

Then the author added a new functionality (at least it was marginally related to the original purpose of the PR).

And it was approved.

And it sat there.

Don’t do that.

Merge your code as soon as it’s safe. You aren’t Sisyphus. And there’s no merit in rework.