When I join a project, I try to get a pull request open quickly to see what comes back.

The change needs to be real enough that somebody cares, and small enough that being wrong is cheap. A review comment can reveal that a rule belongs somewhere I did not expect, or a missing check in CI tells me about a gate that nobody thought to mention during onboarding.

The time to first review and the people pulled into it tell me how work moves through the team. The comments show whether discussion happens before a change or whether the pull request starts it.

I could spend a week reading documentation and asking how the team works. People will describe the process they believe they have. A small pull request shows me the process that exists.

So I try something and watch the response. That is how I start drawing the boundaries.