Pr Writing

PR Writing

A PR description, commit message, or review comment is read by a human deciding whether to trust and merge the change. Write for that reader, not as a record of the work session.

Style rules

• Brief. State the change and the reason. Skip the narrative of how you got there.
• Info-dense, not verbose. Every sentence carries a fact. Cut sentences that restate the diff, the title, or each other.
• Don't write what's inferable. A reviewer can read the diff — don't describe what a line change does if the code already says so. State only what the diff can't show: intent, a non-obvious constraint, a fact you verified.
• Simplified Technical English. One claim per sentence. Concrete subjects, active voice, present tense for current behavior. No hedging ("might", "could potentially", "it seems"), no filler ("simply", "basically", "just"), no marketing language. Say "X fails when Y" — not "there might be an issue where X could fail if Y happens."
• Write for a human, not an AI reviewer. No emoji, no "Generated by", no restating the obvious for machine parsing. Plain prose a teammate would send in Slack.

Pre-open checklist

• CI must pass before you ask for review. Run the project's checks locally first — lint, tests, build. If a check is red after pushing, fix it or say plainly in the PR why it's expected (a known, unrelated flake), never leave it unexplained.
• One PR, one change. A second unrelated fix noticed along the way is a separate PR, not scope creep on this one.
• State only what you verified. "Ran X, confirmed Y" — never "this should work" or "this probably fixes it." An unverified claim in a test plan is itself a defect; a reviewer trusts it and later finds it was false.
• Cite file:line for claims about existing behavior. An uncited claim is a hypothesis the reviewer has to re-derive themselves.
• Reference the issue it closes, if any (Fixes #123), instead of restating the issue's content.

Shape

• Title: <type>(<scope>): <summary>, imperative mood, under ~70 chars.
• Description: 1-3 bullets — what changed, why. A test plan section listing what you actually ran, not what should theoretically pass.
• Comments: lead with the concrete finding, then (if needed) the fix requested. No preamble.

When NOT to apply

• Internal scratch notes, planning docs, or anything not read by another person — write those however is fastest for you.
• The user asks for a different register explicitly (e.g. a detailed design-doc-style PR description for an architectural change that needs the extra context).