When Agent Helps, and Why I Still Write the PR Myself

AI tools are making it easier than ever to generate code, explore ideas, and open pull requests quickly. But faster output does not always lead to better PRs. In practice, AI-generated changes often come with familiar problems: larger diffs, weaker context, less clear intent, and higher review overhead.

In this talk, I will share a practical view of where AI genuinely helps in day-to-day development, where it starts to create problems, and why I still choose to manually craft most pull requests. Rather than arguing against AI, this session focuses on a more useful question for engineers and open-source contributors: how do we use AI as a tool without giving up ownership, clarity, and reviewer empathy?

I will also briefly use my own open-source contribution experience, including work related to Zed, as an example to show why a reviewable, well-structured change is often more valuable than a quickly generated one.

The goal of this talk is to provide practical suggestions about how to build a proper PR to contribute to open-source in a healthy way, and understand why keep context understanding personally is important.

Slide: https://speakerdeck.com/tommyhonym/when-agent-helps-and-why-i-still-write-the-pr-myself