Publish on Next Push is finally here.
We recently rolled out a new feature designed to make the review workflow more intuitive for code authors: Publish on Push. This is now the default behavior when you're the author of a GitHub pull request in Reviewable, and after using it on every PR since the launch, I can confidently say—it’s a game changer. Here’s a quick write-up on how it works and why it matters.
The old publishing workflow for authors
Previously, the typical review flow for a pull request author looked like this:
You’d submit your pull request and wait for the inevitable wave of comments—pointing out bugs, architectural concerns, and a generous serving of nits. You’d reply to what you could immediately, offering context or justification, and take note of the rest to fix.
Once the code was updated, you'd return to the review, make sure every comment had a response, and hit Publish to share your replies.
This is where things could get messy.
Internally we are set up to get email notifications when a review is published. But if you haven’t pushed your new code yet, reviewers would get an email, click through, and land on a review with comments that don’t match the current code. Worse, if you revisit the code post-publish and realize something needs tweaking, your published comments might no longer make sense. Frustrating.
The other alternative—write your responses, then push your code, and then go back to publish—sounds fine, but in practice? If you’re anything like me, you’ll get pulled into a rabbit hole of last-minute phrasing tweaks and obsessive grammar nitpicks. Not great for flow.
And in the worst case, you completely forget to go back and leave all your replies unpublished! Ideally, you could push your code and not have to visit the UI again.
The new workflow: publishing is triggered by code changes
With Publish on Push, you can stage your responses ahead of time and Reviewable will automatically publish them the moment a new commit lands in the PR. No manual follow-up, no race conditions between your comments and the corresponding code.
You stay in control, too. While your responses are staged, the review enters a pending state. You can cancel and update your responses at any point before you push. Once your code hits the branch, we publish your drafts so everything stays in sync.
Want to publish your drafts immediately? Just hit "Publish now" right after initiating Publish on push. And if you don't like the new workflow and want to go back to manual publish, all you have to do is uncheck "Publish on push" in publish options in the Conclusion panel.
Bonus: better previews before you publish
While at it, we’ve also improved the pre-publish comment previewing experience to help you know when you will leave a review in a blocking state. First, you will see a or icon in the Publish button if you will still be blocking after publish.
As for the publish preview, you’ll now find it in the Conclusion panel, giving you a cleaner end-of-session workflow.
Haven't used the Conclusion panel before? You can quickly navigate to it by clicking the in the status bar at the top of every review.
Click Preview Publish to see the complete list of draft comments, rendered exactly as they’ll appear—including their disposition. That means you can see which comments are blocking at a glance, revise the disposition if needed, or jump straight to any discussion for a quick edit.
We hope these changes make your code reviews smoother and more reliable. Try it out and let us know how it’s working for you—we’d love your feedback or chat with us directly.