How we built an engineering culture based on trust that allows us to move incredibly fast without requiring code reviews.

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Raycast's engineering team operates without mandatory code reviews, allowing engineers to push directly to the main branch and request reviews only when needed. This trust-based approach emerged from their early startup days and scaled with their distributed team. They prioritize rapid iteration through daily internal releases, dogfooding changes within 24 hours, and shipping public updates every two weeks. Code reviews are still used selectively for unfamiliar code areas, database migrations, or onboarding new team members. The team relies on post-commit notifications, quick video calls, and continuous integration to maintain quality while avoiding the bottlenecks of traditional pull request workflows.

No code reviews by default

i don’t know about you , but i CAN not be trusted to push to prod directly , i WILL break it.

The most simple and safe solution, would be to give Core Maintainers and Trusted Individual Contributors administrative permission to Squash/Re-Base and Merge Pull Requests directly to the Main Branch. This retains the Batch Process of Pull Requests, while allowing the Contributor or Maintainer to request a manual review. Manual review requests are already a feature of GitHub Pull Requests. All of these things are already features of GitHub Pull Requests. E-Mail used to be your only method for pushing patches with Git. The constant need, by some Engineers, to create shortcuts that become pitfalls later on, is a serious problem in this industry. Look at JavaScript/TypeScript Frameworks, every single Browser ships with a FULL Standard Library of APIs that can be used directly in JavaScript or TypeScript. Yet the entire JavaScript community is trying to run JavaScript Virtual Machines as Web Services and stacking Bundlers on top of Transpilers on top of Compilers on top of Frameworks on top of 1000 NPM Dependencies because of “Developer Experience”. I sincerely wish Raycast good luck with pushing directly to Main and I hope it works out for them but I would never recommend such a practice, when E-Mail and GitHub Pull Request Permission Elevation is already available.

This isn’t move fast and break things. This is break things and cry in the shower because you deemed yourself smart enough to not need a code review when you clearly aren’t 😂

This only works as intended on small, tight teams of people that know the tools and the problem domain.
If you hire a lot or have a lot of churn, this is a terrible idea.

Reviews can be super helpful. But a few of the teams I worked in that were half heatedly trying to be ‘agile’ ended up phoning in the reviews after about a month of mandatory reviews.
Partially due to the amount of time ‘wasted’ on reviews when they have ‘real work’ to do. Partially because they were making dev review code on projects that they were not part of so they had to load large chunks of process into their brains.
So a double stuff up.