Agentic Teaching

Pull requests as pedagogy: teaching the four moves your engineering team has been making all along

Most explainers of the pull request stop at Git mechanics: branch, diff, comment, merge. That framing leaves the most interesting question on the table — why does this ritual produce better work than typing into ``main`` directly? In this paper I argue that the pull request is best understood not as a Git feature but as a compact pedagogical instrument. Each pull request stages four distinct teaching moves: a delegation (the diff), a description (the title and body), a discernment exercise (the review), and a diligence check (CI). Treating the PR this way changes how we onboard humans into engineering practice, and it changes how we onboard the agents that increasingly do the engineering. Every claim in the paper is grounded in a real merged PR in the sof.ai repo at https://github.com/DearMrFree/sof-ai-repo.