Comment by im_lince

This hits home. I’ve run into the same pain with conventional web-based review tools: slow, nitpicky, and nobody really “owns” the merge. Your kernel-style approach makes a ton of sense — putting the reviewer on the hook changes the dynamic completely. And pushing FIXMEs straight into the branch instead of playing comment-ping-pong? That’s a huge quality-of-life win.

We’ve gone a slightly different route at my team. Instead of reinventing the workflow around Gitolite/IntelliJ, we layered in LiveReview(https://hexmos.com/livereview/). It’s not as hardcore, but it gives us a similar payoff: reviewers spend less time on drudge work because LiveReview auto-catches a ton of the small stuff (we’re seeing ~40% fewer prod bugs). That leaves humans free to focus on the bigger design and ownership questions — the stuff machines can’t solve.

Different tools, same philosophy: make review faster, saner, and more about code quality than bureaucracy.