Mathematicians frequently use phrases like It’s obvious or It’s easy to see, which can be profoundly discouraging for a student who does not immediately find a concept simple. In math, grappling with extremely difficult problems is part of the learning process. “A challenging experience,” Ardila told me, “can easily become an alienating one.” It’s especially important to make sure that students are not discouraged during early challenges—what’s hard to see now may become easier in time. He struck this typically demoralizing math language from his teaching.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2021/09/bias-math-sexism-racism/620207/
We’re keen to use stacked PRs at work.
We’re using agentic coding heavily, but still reviewing code to help us steer the software architecture and keep our understanding of the implementation. We generate large changes quickly, but need to break them into smaller, logically ordered PRs for review.
It’s nice for the reviewer to be able to look ahead through the full change, so they see can check the big picture, rather than merging a couple of PRs and then spotting that the abstractions are wrong.
PR stacks work very well for providing this kind of visibility, but are annoying to merge. After one PR in the stack is merged, the next PR needs to be rebased onto and targeted to the updated main branch. With our branch protection rules, this triggers another CI run and dismisses the PR approval, requiring human intervention.
It would be much nicer to have the reviewer go through all the PRs and then merge the stack in one go.