#231 - Faster Code Reviews, Faster Code Shipping with Stacked PRs - Greg Foster

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Sep 1, 2025

Greg Foster, CTO and co-founder of Graphite, shares insights on transforming code reviews for faster development. He reveals how small pull requests enhance feedback and how stacked PRs eliminate waiting times, improving team velocity. The conversation delves into the rise of AI in code reviews, advocating for automated checks in CI workflows. Foster highlights Graphite's unique strategies to achieve top-tier productivity and discusses the evolving landscape of hiring engineers with the advent of AI-assisted coding.

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INSIGHT

Code Review's Evolved Purpose

Code review has shifted from bug-hunting to education, context sharing, and architectural discussion.
AI and CI change responsibilities, but human review remains vital for trust and high-level decisions.

ADVICE

Prefer Small, Focused Code Changes

Make code changes small, targeting ~50–150 lines when feasible to increase review quality and speed.
Prefer small diffs because they get faster, higher-value feedback and are easier to revert if needed.

ADVICE

Parallelize Work With Stacked PRs

Use stacked PRs: branch off a branch to parallelize reviews, CI, and deployments.
Keep coding by checkpointing small dependent changes so waiting times occur in parallel, not serially.

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Are long code review cycles killing your engineering team’s velocity? Learn how top engineering teams are shipping code faster without sacrificing quality.

In this episode, Greg Foster, CTO and co-founder of Graphite, discusses the evolution of code review practices, from the fundamentals of pull requests to the future of AI in code review workflows. He shares the secrets behind how the Graphite team became one of the most productive engineering teams by leveraging techniques like small code changes and stacked PRs (pull requests).

Key topics discussed:

The evolution of code review from bug-hunting to knowledge sharing
Best practices for PRs and why small PRs get better feedback
How stacked PRs eliminate waiting time in development workflows
The rise of AI in the code review process
Why AI code review works best as an automated CI check
How Graphite achieves P99 engineering productivity
Hiring engineers in the age of AI-assisted coding

Timestamps:

(00:00) Trailer & Intro
(02:21) Career Turning Points
(05:11) Now is The Golden Time to Be in Software Engineering
(09:08) The Evolution of Code Review in Software Development
(14:59) The Popularity of Pull Request Workflow
(21:01) Pull Request Best Practices
(26:17) The Stacked PR and Its Benefits
(34:07) How Graphite Ships Code Remarkably Fast
(40:03) The Cool Things About AI Code Review
(45:23) Graphite’s Unique Recipes for Engineering Productivity
(50:55) Hiring Engineers in the Age of AI
(55:31) 2 Tech Lead Wisdom

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Greg Foster’s Bio
Greg Foster is the CTO and co-founder of Graphite, an a16z and Anthropic-backed company helping teams like Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity ship faster and scale AI-generated code with confidence. Prior to Graphite, Greg was a dev tools engineer at Airbnb. There, he experienced the impact of robust internal tooling on developer velocity and co-founded Graphite to bring powerful, AI-powered code review to every team. Greg holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Follow Greg:

LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/gregmfoster
X – x.com/gregmfoster
Email – greg@graphite.dev
Graphite – graphite.dev
Graphite X – x.com/withgraphite

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