Merge Lantern Aims to Direct Senior Code Review Attention to Riskiest PRs

A developer building a tool called Merge Lantern tested a risk-scoring digest against 58 open pull requests in the open-source Unkey codebase to identify which ones most warranted senior attention. The tool surfaced high-risk PRs based on factors like billing code changes, database migrations, dependency lockfile bumps, and failing CI — not simply line count. A 265-line Stripe subscription-deletion change ranked higher than larger but lower-stakes PRs, illustrating that blast radius matters more than size. The digest produced at least one false positive, flagging a CSS change as touching auth logic due to file-path matching rather than actual code analysis — a flaw the developer acknowledged as fixable. Merge Lantern is positioned as a risk intelligence platform that surfaces where engineering attention should go across the full software delivery lifecycle, from ticket creation through PR merge.