The problem
I review a lot of pull requests. Not because I'm a reviewer by trade, but because I'm a solo developer running a few Chrome extensions. Every PR that comes in — whether it's from a contributor or my own — needs to be reviewed.
At some point, I realized I was losing 2 hours a day just deciding what to review first. Not reviewing. Deciding.
GitHub shows PRs in whatever order they were opened. A one-line typo fix and a PR touching authentication code get exactly the same visual weight. Multiply that across 14 open PRs, and you spend more time triaging than actually reviewing.
I tried everything:
- Sorting by age (oldest first) → ignores urgency.
- Sorting by CI status (failing first) → better, but misses structural risk.
- Using labels and milestones → too manual.
What I built
I built a Chrome extension called PR Focus.
It sits on top of GitHub and uses AI to do three things:
- Score risk (0–100) for every PR, based on CI status, PR age, and code scope (auth/DB/infra changes get higher risk).
- Generate plain-English summaries from the actual diff — not from the PR title someone wrote at 11pm.
- Draft review comments in one click (approve or request changes).
The result? My PR inbox is now sorted by priority, not by date. The risky PRs float to the top. The trivial ones wait.
The key decision: BYOK
Instead of running my own AI backend, I made PR Focus BYOK (Bring Your Own Key).
Users bring their own OpenAI, Groq, Mistral, or Ollama key. All AI requests go directly from their browser to the provider. I never see their data or their key.
This was the deciding factor for trust: developers reviewing private repos can use it without worrying about their code hitting a third-party server.
The trade-off
The downside? User friction. Every user has to:
- Create an account with Groq/OpenAI.
- Generate an API key.
- Paste it into the extension.
Some users bounce at this step. But the ones who stay appreciate the transparency — and Groq's free tier covers 95% of individual workflows.
Try it
You can test the live demo without installing anything:
Or install the extension directly from the Chrome Web Store:
I also document my decisions
I write detailed engineering logs about every major decision behind PR Focus — from the hybrid risk scoring algorithm to why I chose BYOK. You can read them all here:
If you're a developer who reviews PRs regularly, I'd love to hear your feedback — what's your current workflow?
