Fast-moving tech companies want to give their developers as much focused time as possible to write code. However, this “inner loop” of the development cycle is often interrupted and blocked by coordination, collaboration, and testing overhead:
- Waiting for CI to run
- Context switching
- Back-and-forth code review cycles
- Merge conflicts
- Branch management
- Complex deployment processes
These complications, referred to as the “outer loop” of development, can significantly slow down even the most productive engineers. Graphite addresses these challenges with an end-to-end developer platform that accelerates code review, automates branch management, and eliminates context switching—letting developers focus on writing great code.
How Graphite accelerates the outer loop
Stay unblocked with stacked PRs
Graphite enables stacking, the version control workflow developed at Meta and Google that enables developers to segment their work into manageable parts, push changes up for review as they go, and never be blocked waiting for feedback. Since adopting the stacking workflow with Graphite, engineers at Asana have regained approximately 7 hours per week and shipped 21% more code.
Stacking helps engineers:
- Parallelize development and review: Stacking enables engineers to push changes up for review and continue writing (“stacking on”) subsequent, dependent changes while waiting for their existing PRs to be reviewed, so they’re never blocked on code review.
- Write smaller PRs: Stacking makes writing smaller, more focused pull requests easy. Reviewers can then be assigned to only the PRs that are most relevant to their domain knowledge, so they don’t have to sift through many unrelated lines of code.
- Improve overall code quality: Small, stacked PRs are easier to review thoroughly, which helps prevent bugs and issues that might be overlooked in larger, monolithic changes for a more robust final product.
Developers can easily get started stacking with the Graphite CLI, which automates the complexities of creating and managing branch dependencies and helps them save hours every week.
Eliminate back-and-forth review cycles with AI
Graphite Reviewer provides immediate, actionable feedback on pull requests with codebase-aware AI, accelerating merge times while improving code quality. Reviewer catches bugs and logical errors in seconds, saving hours of back-and-forth conversations and updates on every pull request. Beyond just bug fixes, Reviewer enforces coding best practices and can even help maintain consistency across the codebase with customizable review prompts and regex rules.
Enterprise-scale pull request tooling
Graphite's PR inbox, Slack integration, and merge queue keep pull requests moving in repos with thousands of engineers.
- Real-time collaboration: Developers receive real-time notifications about PR activities—such as review requests, comments, mentions, and status changes—and can take actions like approving, commenting, requesting changes, or merging directly from Slack.
- Efficient prioritization with the PR Inbox: Graphite’s PR Inbox segments PRs into customizable sections such as 'Needs your review', 'Approved', and 'Merging and recently merged', so developers can quickly identify and focus on urgent tasks.
- Reduced merge conflicts and manual rebasing: The Graphite Merge Queue automates the rebasing and merging process, which reduces merge conflicts at scale and ensures that your trunk branch is always green. Graphite Merge Queue is purpose-built for large teams working with stacked pull requests. It ensures dependent changes are merged together, eliminates redundant CI test runs, and keeps code changes flowing smoothly.
Measuring eng productivity with Graphite Insights
Once you’ve adopted these tools, it’s important to make sure they’re actually contributing to productivity. Graphite Insights offers a powerful way to track key metrics such as total PRs merged, average review times, and the number of review cycles until merge, providing a transparent view into each team member's activities and overall team efficiency. This not only helps in identifying bottlenecks and understanding workflow patterns, but also in recognizing high performers and areas that may require additional support or training.
Take the next step
Fast-growing companies like Ramp have seen immediate productivity gains from Graphite, merging PRs 3 times faster and saving an average of 1-2 hours per week per engineer. Join them today on the code review platform built to accelerate your team:
- Schedule a demo to see Graphite in action with your workflow
- Test Graphite out with a 30-day free trial
- Check out our documentation for more information on getting started