Reviewing More Than Code: How Ephemeral Environments Improved our PR Workflow

Author(s): Leapfrog Technology Originally published on Towards AI. We’ve all reviewed pull requests that looked perfectly fine in the diff, only to discover later that the application behaved differently. The reality is that reviewing code alone isn’t enough. Before merging, we still need to validate the feature, verify the user experience, and ensure nothing else has regressed. The goal is not just to approve code. The goal is to merge with confidence. This has become even more important with the rise of AI-assisted development. As tools like Copilot and agent-based coding assistants start opening pull requests for even small or incremental changes, the volume of changes increases — and so does the need to quickly and safely validate what those changes actually do in practice, not just in the diff. That led us to a simple question: What if every pull request came with its own preview link? Instead of pulling the branch, installing dependencies, and running the application locally, reviewers could simply open a URL and interact with the feature exactly as an end user would. No setup. No local builds. Just click, test, and merge with confidence. This approach is commonly known as a…