Wait, You're Still Doing PRs?

QCon San Francisco 2026

Sponsored session

Wait, You're Still Doing PRs?

Monday Nov 16 / 02:45PM PST (50 minutes), Pacific LM at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

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$2,995, Conference (3 days)
Current pricing ends November 10th

Abstract

PRs were built for open source. A non-maintainer wanted to contribute, a maintainer needed a gate, and you opened the PR early so the two of you could work through the change together while it was still forming. That was the point. The PR was where the thinking happened.

Copilot writes the PR description for you now. Look at what it's actually doing. It reads a finished diff and narrates it back to you. It describes something that already happened. It never captured why the change started in the first place.

That's the question a description can't answer. What was the intent behind the change before anyone wrote code. What acceptance criteria was it satisfying. What todos did it come from, and what agent session acted on them. You can't get that from a diff, and you can't get it from a summary of a diff. You have to record it as the change happens, as its own structure, connected to the record it eventually produces. That connected structure is the semantic change graph, and it's what turns a diff into something you can triage instead of just read.

I'll show what that looks like end to end. Intent, acceptance criteria, the session that acted on them, the change record they produced. Then a live merge blocked by a query against that graph, with the reason and the fix generated from the graph itself, not summarized from a diff after the fact.

Sponsored session

Session sponsored by

The foundation of record for software built by humans and machines.

Every agent's turn produces change. Atomic will show you why.

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$2,995, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends November 10th. All pass options.

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon San Francisco 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

Slides & video

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Current pricing ends November 10th
$2,995, Conference (3 days)

Register