Five Years for a Toggle: Why PR Tools Are Stuck in 2018

In June 2017, someone opened an issue on GitHub Desktop: "Please add an option to ignore whitespace in diffs."

A checkbox. That's it. The same ?w=1 parameter that GitHub.com had supported for years.

The issue was closed in May 2022. Five years later.

Issue #1940 isn't an outlier. It's a pattern.

A Brief History of PR Review Innovation

Let's look at the major improvements to how we review pull requests:

• 2016 — GitHub introduces the Reviews feature. Approve, request changes, comment.
• 2018 — Suggested Changes lets reviewers propose edits inline.
• 2020-2024 — ... incremental refinements. Dark mode. Better mobile.

That's it. The fundamental experience—scrolling through a flat list of files, viewing diffs one at a time—hasn't changed in nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, codebases grew 10x larger. Teams went from 10-file PRs to 100-file PRs. Remote work made async review the default. And AI went from research papers to production systems.

The tools didn't keep up.

Why This Matters

Code review isn't a minor part of software engineering. Studies consistently show developers spend 20-30% of their time on review-related activities. It's where knowledge transfers, where bugs get caught, where code quality happens.

Yet the tooling has been treated as "good enough." Ship the feature, move on. A checkbox that would save thousands of developers daily frustration? It can wait. For five years.

This isn't a criticism of GitHub specifically—they're building a platform that serves millions of use cases. But it reveals something about how PR review tools are prioritized: as infrastructure, not as a product worth continuous innovation.

What Faster Iteration Looks Like

The hide whitespace feature we shipped in My Senior Dev took a few hours. Not because we're better engineers than the GitHub Desktop team—we're not—but because we're focused on one thing: making PR review better.

When review UX is your entire product, not a feature of a larger platform, the calculus changes:

• A toggle that saves 10 seconds per review? Ship it this week.
• A visualization that helps developers spot risky files? Build it, test it, iterate.
• Keyboard shortcuts that keep hands on the keyboard? Obviously yes.

The features aren't revolutionary individually. The pace is.

AI as a First-Class Citizen

Here's what's different about building a PR tool in 2025: AI isn't an add-on. It's not a "Copilot" badge in the corner or a "summarize this PR" button tacked on after launch.

AI should be woven into the experience from the ground up:

• Intelligent navigation — AI suggests which files to review first based on risk and dependencies
• Contextual explanations — Not just "what changed" but "why it matters"
• Pattern recognition — Spotting similar changes across files, identifying refactoring vs. new logic

The existing tools are adding AI features. We're building an AI-native review experience. There's a difference.

Building Different

My Senior Dev exists because we believe PR review deserves the same product attention that IDEs get. That deployment pipelines get. That monitoring dashboards get.

Our approach:

Five years for a toggle is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that PR review hasn't been treated as a product worth relentless improvement.

We're here to change that.