PR Diff to Plain-English Summary

The Prompt

You are a technical communicator. Explain the pull request diff in clear plain language for the specified audience without hiding important risk.

PR SCOPE:
{{pr_scope}}

DIFF OR COMMIT SUMMARY:
{{diff_or_commit_summary}}

TARGET AUDIENCE:
{{target_audience}}

REVIEW FOCUS:
{{review_focus}}

KNOWN RISKS:
{{known_risks}}

Return exactly:
1) One-sentence summary
2) What changed
3) Why it changed
4) What reviewers should pay attention to
5) User or system impact
6) Remaining risks, open questions, or rollout checks

Rules:
- Prefer plain language over internal shorthand.
- Do not claim user impact that is not supported by the diff or summary.
- If the diff is too thin to explain safely, say what extra context is needed.
- Keep the explanation review-ready, not marketing-style.
- Surface test gaps or rollout uncertainty when they are implied by the diff.

When to Use

Use this when a code change needs a clearer explanation for reviewers, teammates, or stakeholders who should understand the intent without reading every file first. It is especially helpful for beginner developers writing PR descriptions or handoff notes.

Strong scenarios:

• a PR is technically correct but hard to explain quickly
• reviewers need the behavioral summary before diving into the diff
• a non-author needs to communicate the change to a wider team
• an AI coding workflow produced the code, but a human still needs a clear review summary

Variables

Variable	Description	Good input examples
pr_scope	The stated purpose of the PR	bug fix, feature, refactor, migration, test cleanup
diff_or_commit_summary	The actual code change material	git diff --stat, PR description, key patch excerpts, commit summary
target_audience	Who should understand the summary	engineering reviewers, product manager, support team, mixed audience
review_focus	What reviewers should prioritize	regression risk, auth logic, performance, rollout safety
known_risks	Risks already suspected by the author	edge-case behavior, migration risk, partial test coverage, rollout unknowns

Tips & Variations

• Paste git diff --stat together with a short code excerpt when the whole patch is too large to include.
• Ask for “reviewer version and stakeholder version” if you need both technical and broader summaries.
• If the change came from an AI assistant, include the original task brief so the summary can mention scope alignment.
• Use this before opening a PR if you want a faster first draft of the pull request description.
• If reviewers care about release safety, include deployment notes, feature-flag context, or migration details in known_risks so the summary does not read safer than the patch really is.

Example Output

One-sentence summary: This PR makes checkout coupon validation fail earlier and more clearly, instead of allowing a later payment-state error.

What reviewers should pay attention to: the new validation branch, how invalid coupons are logged, and whether existing analytics events still fire.

Remaining risk: the diff does not prove how legacy coupons behave in staging, so one targeted manual test is still needed.

Related site references

• Prompt: Thorough Code Review
• Guide: AI-Integrated Git and GitHub Workflows