AI-Powered “Focus Views” for Pull Requests to review what matters

[JelleRoets-Work]

TL;DR

In the era of AI coding agents, massive PRs are generated effortlessly, shifting the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing it. Adding an AI-powered "Focus View" to the Files Changed tab should help human reviewers to focus on architecture and core logic rather than boilerplate. Instead of a massive, alphabetically sorted wall of code, AI would group, filter, and logically order code changes into specific functional topics.

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The Problem: The Review Bottleneck

Big PR's with 100+ commits, 100+ file changes, 1000s of lines of code are now trivial to create but time consuming to review. While AI can definitely help reviewing (by catching bugs, ensuring code consistency, style, basic security scans, etc...), human reviewers are still essential to validate overall architecture and general intent in the bigger picture of the product.

However, the current GitHub PR UI makes human review of massive PR's cumbersome:

• Alphabetical Sorting: Files and folders are listed A-Z, mixing core logic with test files, generated code, and boilerplate.
• Information Overload: Reviewers face a single, endless scroll of thousands of lines of code, making it hard to find a focus on the core functionality of the PR.

Current Solutions

1. Reviewing Commit-by-Commit: Github actually already has a system to create a limited view on a PR: select 1 (or more) commits. However this requires the author to create perfectly contained commits. Furthermore, if a PR goes through multiple iterations, reviewers have to re-read code across multiple commits, while usually you're only interested in reviewing the end result and hence expanding the review time.
2. Stacked PRs: Splitting a big PR into a stack of smaller PR's is a maintenance and rebasing nightmare for the author. While third-party tools exist to manage stacks, they are addressing the symptom on the author's side, rather than solving the UI problem on the reviewer's side.

✨ Proposed Solution: "Focus Views" for PR's

So in the Files Changed tab, next to the View by commit it would be great to add View by topic functionality

• AI-Generated Topics: An AI agent should analyse the content of the PR and proposes a small list of interesting topics to focus on (e.g., Database Schema, Auth Flow, UI Components, etc...).
• Logical Reading Order: When a reviewer clicks a Topic, the UI only shows code relevant to that specific aspect. Crucially, the AI orders the files/chunks by logical reading flow rather than alphabetically.
• Noise Reduction: Inside a Topic, irrelevant boilerplate, configuration, repetitive changes / renames, and test files are hidden or collapsed so the reviewer can focus purely on the structural changes related to the selected topic.
• Manual Control: Reviewers can create their own Topics to review what they're interested in by a simple prompt. Likewise, the PR author can manually define Topics to guide the reviewer, optionally including or excluding more code that the AI agent had assigned to that topic.
• Dynamic Updating: As the PR evolves based on review feedback (new commits added), what the topic view should get automatically updated.

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