A Developer’s Struggle with Pull Request Reviews
It was another late night. Coffee in one hand, I opened yet another pull request with 37 file changes.
"Alright, let’s go through this."
A few minutes in, I was already scrolling endlessly through modified files trying to understand what actually changed, why the changes were made, and whether I really needed to inspect every single file just to understand the pull request.
By the time I got halfway through, my focus was already gone, and I had not even left a single review comment yet.
That was the moment I started thinking:
Why are we still manually reconstructing pull request context in 2025 when most of this information already exists in the diff itself?
That idea led me to build PR Summarizer, a tool designed to automate pull request analysis and help reviewers quickly understand the scope of changes before diving into implementation details.
The project started as a simple experiment but quickly became a practical solution to a very common engineering problem: large pull requests are often difficult and time-consuming to review.
Meet PR Summarizer
PR Summarizer is a custom GitHub Action written in Rust that analyzes pull requests and automatically generates a structured summary directly inside the PR discussion.
The action detects modified, added, and deleted files, creates a concise overview of the changes, and posts the result as a comment on the pull request. To make reviews slightly less repetitive, it also includes a random programming joke in every generated summary.
The goal is not to replace code reviews but to reduce the amount of time reviewers spend trying to reconstruct context manually. Instead, engineers can focus more on implementation quality, architecture, and logic.
The Problem with Large Pull Requests
Pull requests become difficult to review very quickly when they contain too many file changes, vague commit messages, or incomplete descriptions. In many teams, reviewers spend more time understanding the scope of the changes than evaluating the implementation itself.
This creates unnecessary context switching and slows down the development workflow. As pull requests grow larger, the cognitive overhead involved in reviewing them also increases.
A good review process should provide clarity and context upfront rather than forcing engineers to manually piece everything together from commits and diffs.
The Idea Behind PR Summarizer
The idea behind PR Summarizer was straightforward. GitHub already exposes metadata about changed files, commits, and pull request diffs. Instead of requiring reviewers to inspect everything manually from scratch, why not generate a concise overview automatically?
PR Summarizer gives reviewers a high-level understanding of the pull request before they begin reading the implementation details. It helps answer important questions early, including which areas of the codebase changed, whether functionality was added or modified, and which files are most impacted.
That additional context makes reviews faster, especially for large pull requests involving multiple modules or contributors.
Example Output
When a pull request is opened or updated, PR Summarizer generates a structured comment like this:
🚀 PR Summary
📝 Changes Overview
✨ Implemented user authentication
✅ Added JWT token handling
✅ Created registration API
📚 Updated API docs
📂 Affected Files
🟢 [+] src/auth/jwt.rs
🔵 [M] src/routes/users.rs
🔵 [M] README.md
😄 Code Humor
"Why do programmers prefer dark mode? Because light attracts bugs!"
Instead of manually piecing together commits and file diffs, reviewers immediately receive a concise summary that provides useful context about the pull request.
How It Works
The workflow is intentionally simple. Whenever a pull request is opened or updated, PR Summarizer analyzes the changes, generates a structured summary, fetches a random programming joke, and posts everything automatically as a comment on the PR.
Because the action integrates directly into GitHub Actions, teams can adopt it without changing their existing review workflow.
Why Rust?
I chose Rust for this project because it fits particularly well for CLI tooling and CI/CD automation. Rust provides strong performance, excellent memory safety guarantees, and a reliable tooling ecosystem for building lightweight automation tools.
Since GitHub Actions run frequently across repositories, efficiency and predictable execution were important considerations from the beginning.
Getting Started
To use PR Summarizer, add the following workflow to your repository:
name: PR Summarizer
on:
pull_request:
types: [opened, synchronize, reopened]
permissions:
pull-requests: write
issues: write
jobs:
summarize:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout repository
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
fetch-depth: 0
- name: Run PR Summarizer
uses: bansikah22/pr-summarizer@v1.0.0
with:
github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
Once configured, the action automatically generates summaries for every pull request in the repository.
Development
If you want to contribute or run the project locally, you only need Rust 1.83+ and Cargo installed.
git clone https://github.com/bansikah22/pr-summarizer.git
cd pr-summarizer
cargo build
Final Thoughts
Code reviews should focus on implementation quality, architecture, and maintainability rather than forcing engineers to reconstruct context from dozens of changed files.
PR Summarizer helps reduce that overhead by giving reviewers a cleaner starting point before they dive into the details.
The project is still evolving, and there are several improvements planned for future versions, including smarter PR categorization, better grouping of related file changes, AI-assisted summaries, and improved monorepo support.
If you find the project useful, feel free to share feedback or contribute to the project on GitHub.
Top comments (6)
Excellent work @bansikah !!!
Thank you sir😊😊
This looks really nice, good job. Will try to keep an eye as the project grows.
One feedback: I think the jokes part is unnecessary (and if they are generic ones than it even damages the UX), it hurts reach of the overall project.
All the best 👍🏼
Thank you so much @igadii for the feedback, really appreciate😊
Hey, nice job for the github action. Keep it up.
Thank you @emee 🙏