How Nearfleet Slashed PR Cycle Times by 75% and Reclaimed 30 Hours a Week Using Optibot

Timezone friction and senior bottlenecks in a distributed team

‍Nearfleet’s engineering team is geographically distributed spanning from Central Europe to both coasts of the United States. This created a "relay race" workflow where the baton was constantly being dropped due to sleep schedules. With only two senior engineers qualified to perform final reviews, they became involuntary global bottlenecks.

• The 24-Hour Wait: Junior engineers in the US often waited an entire day for European seniors to wake up.
• Senior Burnout: Reviewers spent up to 12 hours a day—their entire shift—clearing the global PR queue.
• Repetitive Friction: Seniors spent excessive time pointing out obvious, "simple" mistakes that should have been caught before the review reached a different continent.

Without an automated layer, the team couldn't scale their velocity. Every new feature was held hostage by a manual review queue that never slept, but wasn't always awake in the right timezone.

An AI "Senior Engineer" for a 24/7 workflow

NearFleet integrated Optibot as the first line of defense. Rather than replacing humans, Optibot acted as an automated "second senior engineer" that provided immediate, high-context reviews regardless of which timezone the developer was in.

• Closing the Timezone Gap: Optibot provides instant preliminary reviews at 2:00 AM, allowing US-based juniors to fix issues before European seniors even wake up.
• Human-Readable Summaries: Optibot generates clean summaries of every PR, allowing seniors to understand the "intent" of a change instantly, without the need for a synchronous hand-off call.
• Compliance at Scale: During a major 15,000-line refactor, Optibot identified PII leaks that had slipped past manual QA—preventing a major compliance breach across the distributed codebase.

75% Faster PR Cycles and 99% PII Detection

How NearFleet Reclaimed 30 Hours a Week by Enabling 24/7 Asynchronous Reviews for Their Distributed Team

• 30 Hours Reclaimed Per Week: The team saves roughly 30 hours every week previously spent on manual review cycles and timezone hand-offs.
• 75% Faster Reviews: Total manual time per PR was slashed from 4 hours to 1 hour.
• Asynchronous Velocity: Juniors receive instant feedback, allowing features to move from "submitted" to "merged" without waiting for a senior's workday to begin.

1. Scalability for distributed teams - By removing the "low-level" friction, NearFleet transformed their culture from one of waiting to one of building. Seniors now focus strictly on high-level architecture rather than policing syntax across time zones.

2. A safer code base - Because Optibot is trained on compliance (HIPAA/PII), it acts as a permanent security auditor. It caught a major leak in 15,000 lines of code that would have reached staging otherwise.

3. Behavioral change - The "blame" factor disappeared. Juniors now use Optibot "maliciously"—submitting PRs specifically to see what the AI catches so they can learn and fix issues privately before a human ever sees the code.