Microsoft's Nudge service leverages AI to speed up completion of pull requests

Microsoft is using AI to accelerate pull requests -- the feature that lets developers tell others about changes they've made to code -- toward completion by reminding authors to engage with their overdue requests. That's according to a new whitepaper published this week detailing Nudge, an end-to-end service that leverages models based on effort estimation to predict the completion time for a given pull request. Microsoft says that Nudge has been deployed on 147 of its internal repositories since 2019 and that it's "significantly" reduced completion time for 60% for the 8,500 pull requests for which it sent notifications. With the adoption of platforms like GitHub and GitLab, pull requests have become the standard mechanism for distributed code reviews. They enable changes to be reviewed by one or more developers and even bots; once the reviewers have signed off, the changes can be merged with the main branch and deployed.