SteeplyOpinionated: A PR Review Tool for Tea Recipes (Returns 418, Obviously)

Published: (April 12, 2026 at 12:02 PM EDT)
2 min read
Source: Dev.to

Source: Dev.to

What I Built

A pull request review tool that does absolutely nothing useful.

You paste your tea recipe. A senior engineer reviews it. Every step has critical issues. The PR can never be merged. It returns HTTP 418 — I’m a teapot.

Because someone had to build this. And that someone was me.

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge.

Demo

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Code

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How I Built It

Built with Python + FastAPI because enterprise tea deserves enterprise tooling.

The reviewer is a highly sophisticated, enterprise‑grade AI system — which is actually just a carefully curated list of passive‑aggressive comments. No AI was harmed in the making of this tool. No AI was used either. Just pure, hand‑crafted pedantry.

Sample review comments

  • “Magic number detected. Extract 3 minutes to STEEP_DURATION_SECONDS environment variable.”
  • “No error handling. What if the kettle fails? Where is the retry logic?”
  • “Side effects detected. This step mutates global state (the cup). Please isolate.”
  • “No unit tests found for this step. How do we know boiling actually works?”

Every merge attempt returns HTTP 418 — I’m a teapot as nature intended.

Prize Category

Best Ode to Larry Masinter — because RFC 2324 deserves a production‑grade implementation. Thank you, Larry, for your vision. This is the tool he always dreamed of. Probably.

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