Graphite's New PR Page Tackles the Problem Nobody's Talking About
AI is writing more code. Everyone knows this. But here's what people aren't thinking about: if AI writes 4x more code, someone still has to review, test, merge, and deploy all of it.
Tomas Reimers, cofounder and CPO at Graphite, has been watching this problem unfold in real time. One large financial company has already increased its pull requests per developer by a factor of four this year. When he asks engineering teams if they have extra capacity for code review, the answer is always the same: "Not even a little bit. We're already bursting at the seams."
That's the problem Graphite's new PR page redesign aims to solve.
Code Review Is Laundry
Reimers uses a straightforward analogy to explain the challenge: "Code review is laundry."
It's necessary. Everyone has to do it. But most people dread it.
"If you're an adult, you look at laundry and you're like, it's a thing we got to do," Reimers said. "But for many people, when they first start doing laundry, they're like, this is a frustrating experience. We need to give them the laundry machine."
The redesign isn't trying to eliminate code review. It's trying to make it less painful.
Here's why that matters: the average time developers spend actually reading code during a review is under 10-20 minutes. But the average time to first review is closer to 24 hours.
Why the massive gap?
"A lot of it is that you give me a pull request and I'm like, Tom, I'm busy. I'm gonna come back to this," Reimers explained. "Because in my head, I'm like, this is a four-hour project. This is not a 10-minute project."
The mental overhead of code review causes developers to defer it. And when developers defer reviews, everyone gets blocked.
What Changed
Graphite rebuilt the PR page from the ground up, focusing on reducing friction. Key details like status, checks, and reviewers now appear at the top. The file tree moved to the left side of the diff. Versions sit above the code.
The biggest addition is Action Cards. These surface PR status in real time and let authors resolve issues with a single click through Agent Chat.
But the real goal isn't about specific features. It's about making code review feel less like a chore.
"One of the best pieces of feedback we've gotten three or four times from users now is the new PR page makes code review fun for me again," Reimers said. "I believe that if we can make it fun, if we can make this a thing that people don't dread but want to do, we're going to be good."
Small Changes, Big Impact
Graphite has already seen evidence that reducing friction speeds things up. Small PRs get reviewed 30-40% faster than larger ones—not because developers are notified differently, but because they're more likely to tackle a 50-line PR immediately versus saving a 500-line PR for later.
Chat features showed similar results. When a reviewer asks for a simple change like updating a comment, developers often defer it until tomorrow. With chat, they can fix it instantly and merge.
"It's not an activity for me," Reimers said. "It's like, do it and then merge. Check the box. Log off."
The core resource isn't developer time. It's developer energy.
Workflows Vary More Than Expected
During testing, Graphite learned that developers approach code review in surprisingly different ways.
Some start with the description. Others jump straight to CI checks—if the build isn't passing, they won't touch the PR. Many developers make multiple passes through the code. Others use Command F to jump around sporadically, following function calls and references.
The file tree turned out to be more important than anyone expected. For some developers, it's more critical than the PR description.
"There are so many workflows that we've learned that developers love that we had no idea," Reimers said.
One unexpected piece of feedback: some developers strongly prefer markdown over the new WYSIWYG editor. Graphite is listening.
The Next Wave
Reimers sees two problems on the horizon.
Short-term, developers want better tools to understand code. They're already pulling PRs into Cursor or Claude to ask, "Explain this change to me."
Longer-term, a bigger challenge is coming: background agent PRs.
Some smaller companies already see more than 50% of their code written by autonomous agents. Reimers expects that by July 2026, more than 25% of PRs at many companies will be written by AI autonomously.
"Those patterns of development look like you wake up and you have five PRs waiting for you and you're like, where did this come from?" Reimers said. "There's no one I can talk to about it. There's only the AI."
That's a problem nobody's thinking about yet.
Why This Matters
The redesign is about creating space in what Reimers calls the "human context window." Just like AI models need efficient context management, so do developers.
"It's taking things out of the human context window so that they can focus on what matters," he said.
For developers who've only ever used GitHub's PR page, Graphite offers a different approach—one built specifically for the reality of AI-accelerated development. And you can try it without moving your repo.
As AI continues to generate more code, the bottleneck won't be writing it. The bottleneck will be reviewing it.
Graphite is betting that making code review simpler, faster, and less draining is how teams will keep up.