Imprint's "small-change" lets automated checks approve a narrow class of pull requests

Larson reports that Imprint's average engineer merges 4x more pull requests than two years ago, and that median review time rose from 33 to 77 minutes. A pull request qualifies as a small-change if it is under 1,000 lines, has no P1 or P2 findings from the team's review bot, comes from an author with 10 or more prior merged PRs in that service, and stays within a limited number of services. Shared libraries are excluded. A review skill then approves or ignores qualifying PRs, and it never comments, which Larson says avoids "meat proxy review." Any error from a small-change is treated as a system failure to fix in the checks.

Larson says it is too early for results: about 10% of changes qualify so far. He also reports incidents down 42% and critical incidents down 78% half over half. Those figures describe the company's overall trend, and the post does not tie them to small-change.

Why it matters: This is a worked example of replacing per-PR human review with eligibility rules and a stricter standard for errors, with its limits stated. Whether it holds depends on how fast the verification coverage grows, which Larson says himself.