Thorsten Ball: why are you still using pull requests?
Ball says agents make the pull request obsolete and his team pushes straight to main behind feature flags. A colleague's reply: that still sounds like a better PR, not a different thing.
The big disagreement
Thorsten Ball says pull requests are obsolete, replies say he renamed them
Thorsten Ball asked why anyone still uses pull requests, arguing you can spawn Opus 5.5, Fable and Astra to review four times each, and that long-lived branches are the opposite of continuous integration. His team works in orbs, pushes to main, and shares an orb portal URL or a feature-flagged slice instead of a diff.
It feels like we need a more continuous consensus protocol (whereas PRs are discrete moments of consensus building)
Receipts
Opus 5.5 traced a $90,000 bill to an .env Codex published to Cloudflare
@justlingonberry says Opus 5.5 found that Codex had published their .env to Cloudflare Pages, explaining a $90,000 Google bill, while Codex found nothing and flagged the chat as a cybersecurity risk. ThePrimeagen amplified it.
so opus 5.5 literally wrote its own computer use script in python, drove chrome with screenshots and mouse clicks, attached both videos and sent the emails anyway.
Model and agent watch
Claude Code now gzips every turn, and Theo says you can feel it
Anthropic says Claude Code now gzips the conversation it sends on every turn so it reaches the model faster, and cloud sessions start up as soon as you begin typing. Theo says the model starts responding almost immediately after he presses enter, and that the difference is most noticeable when steering mid-task. No one has posted latency numbers.
Diff is most notable with steering imo, you can see model correcting in real time.