The Pull Request Is Dying — And That's the Point

On April 15, 2026, GitHub did something it hadn't done in twenty-one years: it let repository owners disable Pull Requests entirely.

Not close one PR. Disable the feature. You used to be able to turn off Issues. Now you can turn off PRs too. Within 24 hours, OpenAI split its Agents SDK cleanly in half — "harness" (the brain) on one side, "compute and storage" (the body) on the other, with the harness now open-source and execution delegated to partner sandboxes. Cloudflare, Modal, Daytona, e2b, and Vercel all announced official integrations the same day (Source: Latent Space — RIP Pull Requests).

The next morning, Simon Willison published a 7-line prompt that ships a feature autonomously. Claude Code clones the reference repo, reads the implementation, writes the change, runs uvx rodney to compare the output, and opens a PR. Willison never touched the diff (Source).

Three signals in 48 hours. Not a coincidence.

The PR isn't dying because GitHub decided to kill it. It's dying because the unit of code collaboration changed.

The Visa That Stopped Making Sense

Pull Requests were invented in 2005 (lore.kernel.org) and popularized by GitHub in 2008 (github.blog). The whole system was designed for one kind of reviewer: a human with a coffee, a code editor, and 20 minutes to read 400 lines of diff.

Humans considered it obvious. Anyone who learned to code in the last 15 years cannot imagine a life without it.

Agents don't see it that way. Agents don't need a visa. They need a sandbox pass: get in, run, get out. An Agent might rewrite 47 files in one shot — no human can review that diff, and no human should try.

Pete Steinberger and Theo have been saying this for months: call it a Prompt Request, not a Pull Request. Their reasons are blunt:

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