Blast radius
The Low, Medium or High reach chip: how much of the code base a change can affect.
On this page
The blast radius chip says how far a pull request's change can reach: Low, Medium or High. It is a second reading beside the size. A 2,000-line lock file update reaches little; a four-line change to a database migration can reach a lot. The chip shows its reasons, so you can check it and disagree. It is worked out from the list of changed files, with no AI.
#The levels
High: read it properly
Any one of these:
- It touches a contract other code depends on: a database migration or schema, published type definitions, service contracts (protobuf, GraphQL, Thrift, OpenAPI), infrastructure code, or auth and security code.
- It touches a hub: a file that, in this repository's history, often changes together with many others.
- It spreads wide: three or more areas, six or more folders, or 15 or more code files.
- It is large: 1,000 or more lines of code.
Low: a quick look is enough
No contract is touched, and either no code files changed (only docs, config, tests or dependencies), or at most three code files and 100 lines, in one area.
Medium
Everything else. The chip names what kept it out of Low, for example "too many files" or "too long".
#When there is no chip
No chip means Limn does not know. That happens when the file list has not synced, the size was never seen, or GitHub cut the file list short and nothing in the part it sent makes the change High. A cut-short list is never called Low, because the missing files could only add reach.
A change whose every line is a comment, or that only moved whitespace, is never more than Medium.
#Tune it
In Settings → Pull requests, choose how strict the chip is: Cautious (fewer pull requests count as Low), Balanced (the default) or Relaxed (more count as Low). You can also choose which kinds of contract count. Every chip in the app changes at once.