I recently realized that I was spending more time telling people what I wanted them to do in their merge requests than I would spend just merging their thing an

I recently realized that I was spending more time telling people what I wanted them to do in their merge requests than I would spend just merging their thing and patching it the way I want. So, for small projects I manage on my own, this totally makes sense: instead of saying "this comment has a typo" or "could you rephrase this message", I find that it's easier to just rephrase the thing myself than do another round-trip with the contributor. It makes everyone happier: I get things exactly the way I want them, and the contributor doesn't feel like they're wasting time on trivialities, while still getting their contribution acknowledged. The "suggest change" feature in GitHub and GitLab does do some of that, by the way, so for me that's a viable alternative. And of course this works only if you're the sole (or one of few) maintainers who can commit directly to the HEAD branch. If you need to do another merge request to fix those issues, that process doesn't work so well, obviously, and there are some errors that just need to be fixed. But I found that it pays to be less "nitpicky". It certainly makes for a more relaxed ambiance. :)