Small Pull Requests: Why They Move Development Teams Faster

In many backend teams, pull requests slowly grow into something nobody wants to review. A developer starts working on a feature. At first, it’s just a small change — maybe a new endpoint or a service update. Soon another improvement gets added. A small refactor follows. Finally, a fix for something unrelated appears. Two days later, the pull request contains 900 lines of changes across 14 files. At that moment, something predictable happens. The review slows down. Not because the reviewers are lazy — but because large pull requests create cognitive overload. And once reviews slow down, the entire development workflow begins to lose momentum. Previous article in this category: https://codecraftdiary.com/2026/02/21/why-just-one-more-quick-fix/ The Psychological Problem of Large Pull Requests Large pull requests create a subtle psychological effect. When a reviewer opens a PR and sees: +824 −217 changes their brain immediately categorizes it as expensive work. The result is predictable: T