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PR descriptions over standups
We do not run daily standups. The pull request is the standup — what changed, why, what risk, what to test. The team reads PRs in their own time.
Placeholder method entry. Rewrite the body before launch.
A daily standup is a synchronous tax that interrupts the team’s deep work to produce information that could have been written down in five minutes and read in two. We have replaced it with the pull request description.
A PR description tells the team what changed, why it changed, what could break, and how to verify it. It is the unit of asynchronous communication. If your PR description does not let a teammate review the change without a meeting, the description is incomplete.
Why
Async communication scales. Standups do not. A five-person team in three time zones is a meeting nobody wants to attend. A PR description is read by everyone who needs it, on their schedule, and stays searchable forever.
How we do it
- PR description template lives in
.github/pull_request_template.md. - Required sections: summary, why, risk, test plan.
- The author posts the PR link in the team channel. That is the standup.
- A weekly thirty-minute sync covers what cannot be written down: morale, hiring, client politics.