Some pull requests waste a surprising amount of time without anyone touching the code. They look almost ready, but the conversation turns into process debugging: what is still blocking this? which approval is missing? is this check actually required? do we need another team here? why is GitHub still not letting this merge? That is a bad trade. Code review time should go to design, correctness, maintainability, and risk, not branch protection detective work. Review quality drops when readiness is unclear Code review is not just bug finding. It is also where teams share context, mentor newer engineers, align on standards, and discuss tradeoffs. When merge requirements are unclear, that higher-value work gets displaced by process confusion. Instead of asking whether the change is sound, people start decoding state from checks, reviews, labels, and scattered UI hints.…