I stopped writing PR descriptions. Here's what I did instead.

I opened 6 PRs last week.
I wrote a good description for exactly one of them.

The rest looked like this:

• "fix bug"
• "update styles"
• "wip"
• "changes" (my personal low point)

And I'm not even ashamed — I've seen senior engineers with
10 years of experience do the same thing.

Here's why it happens:

You just finished 3 hours of deep work. You know exactly what
you changed and why. Writing it down feels like explaining a
joke — the effort of articulating it kills the momentum. So
you type something vague and hit submit.

The reviewer then has to reverse-engineer your intent from
the diff. They leave a comment asking what you changed.
You explain it in the comment. Everyone wastes 20 minutes
doing what the PR description should have done in the first place.

So I started building a GitHub App to fix this for myself.

It hooks into GitHub, reads the diff when you open a PR,
and writes the description for you. Structured — what changed,
why, how to test it, what to watch for. Takes about 4 seconds.

I'm still building it. Calling it PRDraft.

Honest question for this community: is this a real pain
for you, or have you just accepted it as part of the job?

If you want it : https://prdraft.carrd.co

Comments

[Shaurya Dwivedi]

I wanted to ask like what makes it different from me asking my cli to generate a description based on the commits, + how would you tackle PR's in which the description is very strict incase of opening a pr on any opensource project with strict contribution guidelines, if you could tackle that, it'll be great! :D

[Twisted-Code'r]

Great questions. Two things differentiate it from commit-based generation:

1. Diffs are more accurate than commits — commits describe intent,
   diffs describe reality. If you changed 3 files but only committed
   "fix bug", the diff tells the full story.

2. The open source template angle is exactly what I'm building next —
   you'd be able to give it a repo's CONTRIBUTING.md and it follows
   the required format. Would that solve your use case?

If you want to test it early: prdraft.carrd.co

[Shaurya Dwivedi]

The open source template angle is exactly what I'm building next —
you'd be able to give it a repo's CONTRIBUTING.md and it follows
the required format. Would that solve your use case?

yup this would solve the issue!

i'll try it and will let you know if i get any issues.

[Twisted-Code'r]

Hey Shaurya — did you get a chance to try it? Happy to help if you ran into anything. The CONTRIBUTING.md feature you mentioned is something I'm actively working on.