--- title: description: I hit 100 merged PRs in a day this afternoon, not long after turning 50. Both are round numbers, and both are more useful as questions than as trophies. --- This afternoon I refreshed the stats page in my tooling and the merged count read 100.

noj stats page: 100 merged pull requests in the 24 hours to 3pm, 35 open — 100 merged.

I set that number for myself [earlier this year](/building-towards-100-prs-a-day/): 100 "meaningful" pull requests in a single day, on a single project. Even then I wasn't sure it was ambitious enough. When I [wrote about attention](/more-attention-not-less/) my best day was 58 and a regular one high 30s; two days ago it was 72, against an average around 40. The other round number is that I turned 50 recently. Fifty gets called a midpoint, which is optimistic arithmetic, but the real use of a round birthday is that it makes you stop and ask what the next stretch is for. A hundred PRs is the same kind of number: arbitrary, decimal, and still worth stopping for. Later in the day I peaked around 117 in a 24-hour period. Of those, around a quarter were "zero touch" and the remainder I merged by hand[^1]. What the number measures is capacity. It says the system -- the harness, the CI, the risk tiers, the 5-10 epics -- can move a hundred changes through me in a day without me thrashing. That's what I set it to measure, and that's all it measures. It doesn't measure value. A hundred PRs is a hundred units of work shaped to be mergeable, and counting them tells you nothing about whether they were the *right* hundred[^2]. PR count is the metric everyone warns you about, and they're right; I only get away with it because it's self-set and nobody pays me per merge. Naturally, having explained why the number doesn't mean very much, my next goal is 700 in a week. Looking at that chart: - Very little happens overnight. It's not dead time. I usually use that time (aka "quota") for longer-running tasks. But the system needs to be doing productive work without my attention too. - Open PRs hover around 30. That's not bad, but I'd rather they trend closer to zero. I think ~10-20 is a practical number given the WIP targets. - I need to lift the auto-merge rate. Even an increase from 25% to 35% has a huge downstream impact. Cheers! ### FOOTNOTES [^1]: The other 23 were auto-merged; [the original post](/building-towards-100-prs-a-day/#sprinting-the-last-mile) describes the risk assessment behind the reviews, from "robot" through to "three brains", and the rest I read, or at least glanced at, before merging. [^2]: Greg Wilson's [Twelve Ways to Be Wrong About AI-Assisted Coding](https://third-bit.com/2026/05/20/twelve-ways-to-be-wrong/) has the standard warning: track commit counts and you get more, smaller commits, with the numbers improving while the work doesn't.