“with each engineer producing three to five PRs per day, even on a team of three, merge conflicts were super miserable, right? Because these PRs tended to be pretty big, we were working on the same parts of the code base.”
Video moment · 37:04 · youtube.com
From “Harness Engineering: How to Build Software When Humans Steer, Agents Execute — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI”, found 2026-10-14.
Two fixes: restructure the code so less of it overlaps, and keep PRs open for less time. PRs stayed open waiting for human review, so a review agent now runs on every push and blocks a merge on serious findings. Quoted from YouTube’s auto-generated captions.