Don't Do Code Reviews

https://kore-nordmann.de/blog/dont_do_code_reviews.html

by ingve • 22 days ago

3 1 22 days ago

othmanosx• 21 days ago

Human reviews do still matter a lot. our goal is to speed this up, not replace it completely with AI reviews. I think AI should complement the human review, not replace it, and I think everyone already agrees with me on this.

The problem with AI reviews, is that they add a lot more text to read, the PR description is another wall of text, test steps are very verbose, most comments are just noise.

I believe AI should instead help pointing the dev to the important stuff and help identify noise, this would actually make the review go faster.

since the introduction of AI, the bottleneck for shipping code shifted from producing code to reviewing it, and the PR reviewing experience on Github is lackluster, leaving a lot to be desired.

my team now ships too much code and it sits in review for too long, reviewing AI code is not easy and we need a better tool to review code, especially on large PRs, Github no longer meets my needs or use cases so I had to build something myself.

I got frustrated enough that I built my own reviewer around this idea: instead of adding commentary, it groups files into folders by complexity, surfaces the handful of changes that actually need deep review, and marks the mechanical noise so you can blow through it. On migration PRs it cut my review time down a lot.

With AI shipping code quickly we got to some of the long awaited migration work that we wanted to do long ago. And now we're pushing PRs with 10K and 20K lines of code. And that actually helped speed up the review process immensely. Instead of AI adding a new summary article, it just helped me to identify the noise and the repeated patterns. In these migration PRs and skim them quickly, then focus on the important parts of the migration that need a closer look. Since all these files are grouped now, I can just toggle a whole folder as viewed so I can focus on leaving comments on the other files and addressing them while not affecting the parts that are already viewed in the PR. That also made the feedback loop more efficient.

I can share more if people are curious, I'd rather not turn this into an ad.

Don't Do Code Reviews

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