Pretty PR
Pull request descriptions that don’t embarrass you.
Pretty PR turns a messy commit history into a pull request description you’re not ashamed to open. It reads your diff and commits and writes the whole thing — title, description, reviewer notes, testing checklist, and a changelog entry — in about half a minute. Its tagline is exactly the problem it solves: “PR descriptions that don’t embarrass you.”
What it produces
Every run generates five reviewer-focused pieces, so a PR arrives ready to review instead of ready to interrogate:
- A PR title in clean, conventional-commit style — clear and scannable in a crowded list.
- A description that explains what changed, why, and how it works.
- Reviewer notes that flag the parts needing real attention and quietly wave past the parts that don’t.
- A testing checklist derived from the actual diff, so reviewers know what to exercise.
- A changelog entry, pre-formatted and ready to paste into
CHANGELOG.md.
How you use it
It meets you wherever your workflow already is, on-demand or automatic:
- Web app — paste your commits in a browser tab, no setup and no signup required.
- CLI — run
npx @alexandrakay/pretty-pr, with flags like--diff,--full, and--outto control input and export. It’s MIT-licensed and free. - GitHub Action — drop one workflow file in and it writes a description for every new PR automatically.
Teams can commit a .prettyrc file to lock in format, tone, and template — sections like motivation, approach, testing, and ticket references — so descriptions read consistently no matter who opened the PR.
Where it fits — and where it doesn’t
Pretty PR is at its best on real, self-explanatory diffs: the change is sound, you just don’t want to hand-write the prose around it. It won’t invent context that isn’t in your commits, and it’s not a substitute for a thoughtful title on a genuinely tricky architectural change — a human should still read what it drafts. But for the ninety percent of PRs that are perfectly reasonable and perfectly tedious to document, it removes a small tax paid on every single review.
There’s a quieter benefit, too: consistency lowers review friction for everyone downstream. When every PR arrives with the same shape — a clear title, a summary, notes on what to scrutinise, a testing checklist — reviewers spend their attention on the code instead of reverse-engineering what the change even is. Good descriptions are a courtesy to the next person, and the honest truth is that most of us skip them under deadline. Automating the courtesy is the whole trick.
Who it’s for
Developers and engineering teams who care about review quality but keep shipping “update stuff” as a PR title. Solo maintainers get a tidy public changelog for free; teams get consistency across contributors without policing it by hand.
Why it’s here
Pretty PR comes from the same Code Shock network as FindMeeting and carries the same “kill the busywork” instinct — remove the friction from a thing people do constantly and resent every time. If your team ships pull requests, it’s worth trying free. And if it’s meetings rather than merges eating your week, FindMeeting and the guides are right next door.
New here? FindMeeting is the free group scheduler from the same team — or read the guides and see the rest of the network.