The PR Shipped. Did the Engineer Grow?

The merged PR can be excellent while the source of judgment remains unclear.The project is a success. The pull request is clean, the design document is thorough, and the change shipped faster than expected. Yet at the six-month review, the manager still cannot answer the question that matters: what can this engineer decide now that they could not decide six months ago?Consider a project to add automatic retries to an event-processing service. An LLM proposes a plausible design: exponential backoff, capped attempts, sensible alerts, and clean tests. The engineer turns it into a polished pull request.During review, a staff engineer asks whether the downstream handler is idempotent. It is not. Under the wrong failure conditions, the proposed design could create duplicate side effects. The team revises the approach, and the change ships safely.The review worked: the system is safe, and the team can operate it. What the merged pull request does not reveal is whether the engineer learned to…