The follow on. Lots and LOTS of unrelated changes can be a symptom of an immature codebase/product, simply a new endeavor.

If it’s a greenfield project, in order to move fast you don’t want to gold plate or over predictive future. This often means you run into misc design blockers constantly. Which often necessitate refactors & improvements along the way. Depending on the team this can be broken out into the refactor, then the feature, and reviewed back-to-back. This does have it’s downsides though, as the scope of the design may become obfuscated and may lead to ineffective code review.

Ofc mature codebases don’t often suffer from the same issues, and most of the foundational problems are solved. And patterns have been well established.

/ramble

There is no context here though?

If this is a breaking change to a major upgrade path, like a major base UI lib change, then it might not be possible to be broken down into pieces without tripping or quadrupling the work (which likely took a few folks all month to achieve already).

I remember in a previous job migrating from Vue 1 to Vue 2. And upgrading to an entirely new UI library. It required partial code freezes, and we figured it had to be done in 1 big push. It was only 3 of us doing it while the rest of the team kept up on maintenance & feature work.

The PR was something like 38k loc, of actual UI code, excluding package/lock files. It took the team an entire dedicated week and a half to review, piece by piece. We chewet through hundreds of comments during that time. It worked out really well, everyone was happy, the timelines where even met early.

The same thing happened when migrating an asp.net .Net Framework 4.x codebase to .Net Core 3.1. we figured that bundling in major refactors during the process to get the biggest bang for our buck was the best move. It was some light like 18k loc. Which also worked out similarly well in the end .

Things like this happen, not that infrequently depending on the org, and they work out just fine as long as you have a competent and well organized team who can maintain a course for more than a few weeks.

Just a few hundred?

That’s seems awfully short no? We’re talking a couple hours of good flow state, that may not even be a full feature at that point 🤔

We have folks who can push out 600-1k loc covering multiple features/PRs in a day if they’re having a great day and are working somewhere they are proficient.

Never mind important refactors that might touch a thousand or a few thousand lines that might be pushed out on a daily basis, and need relatively fast turnarounds.

Essentially half of the job of writing code is also reviewing code, it really should be thought of that way.

(No, loc is not a unit of performance measurement, but it can correlate)

If you do this enough you know how to design your solutions to be relatively flexible. At least for your backends.

Your frontend will always churn, that’s the nature of the job.

I think you can have a well tended garden without giving up creativity.

You’re not sacrificing creativity by practicing structures, considerations, and methodologies that maintain or improve the developer experience with whatever creative endeavor you’re on.

The structure of your garden doesn’t prevent you from playing around with new plants, it just outlines a set of patterns and expectations known to drive better outcomes.

I’m not saying that your extension of the analogy is bad I’m just disagreeing with some of the premise.

Pretty much.

For instance focusing on PR size. PR size may be a side effect of the maturity of the product, the type of work being performed, the complexity or lack thereof of the real world space their problems touch, and in the methodologies habits and practices of the team.

Just looking at PR size or really any other single dimensional KPI lead you to lose the nuance that was driving the productivity in the first place.

Honestly in my experience high productivity comes from a high level of unity in how the team thinks, approaches problems, and how diligent they are about their decisions. And isn’t necessarily something that’s strictly learned, it can be about getting the right people together.