Comment by Quarrelsome
13 days ago
> but the signal to noise ratio is poor
Nail on the head. Every time I've seen it applied, its awful at this. However this is the one thing I loathe in human reviews as well, where people are leaving twenty comments about naming and then the actual FUNCTIONAL issue is just inside all of that mess. A good code reviewer knows how to just drop all the things that irk them and hyperfocus on what matters, if there's a functional issue with the code.
I wonder if AI is ever gonna be able to conquer that one as its quite nuanced. If they do though, then I feel the industry as it is today, is kinda toast for a lot of developers, because outside of agency, this is the one thing we were sorta holding out on being not very automatable.
at my last job code review was done directly in your editor (with tooling to show you diffs as well).
What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This was typically a big shock for new hires who were used to the "comment for every nitpick" system; I think it can feel insulting when someone changes your feature. But I quickly came to love it and can't imagine doing code review any other way now. It's so much faster!
I'm not sure how to tie this to AI code review tbh. Right now I don't think I'd trust a model's taste for when to change things and when to leave a comment. But maybe that'll change. I agree that if you automated away my taste for code it'd put me in a weird spot!
Was that Jane Street? I remember watching a presentation from someone there about such a system.
If not, any chance this tooling is openly available?
> Was that Jane Street?
yep
I think the closest such thing we have is "suggestions" on github and gitlab.
This is the workflow I've always dreamed of. In a lot of ways making a change which is then submitted as patch to their patch isn't really that different from submitting a comment to their patch. The workflow of doing that directly in editor is just wonderful.
If I had to pick, I actually think ONLY being able to submit "counter-patches" would be better than only being able to submit comments. Comments could just be actual programming language style comments submitted as code changes.
What if you have two people with different ideas of how to name a certain variable and they just flip the name back and forth every release?
I like this review method too though, and like that some pr review tools have a 'suggest changes' and 'apply changes' button now too
> What if you have two people with different ideas of how to name a certain variable and they just flip the name back and forth every release?
Fire both. There is no amount of skill and productivity that can justify that amount of pettiness.
Typically in this system you encode obligations - e.g. "eieio should review, or at least be aware of, all changes made to this library." I think that means you're unlikely in practice to have a problem like that, which (unless the team is not functioning well) requires two people who care deeply about the variable name and don't know that someone else is changing it.
I think it's a good idea to have a style guide of sorts that you can point to when people sweat the small stuff.
>What if you have two people with different ideas of how to name a certain variable and they just flip the name back and forth every release?
You fire both or at least one of them. Problem solved.
Apply rule 8 of Go
If minor mistakes are corrected without the PR author's input, do they ever learn to stop making those mistakes themselves? It seems like a system where you just never bother to learn, e.g., style conventions, because reviewers just apply edits as needed.
> What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This is my dream; have only had a team with little enough ego to actually achieve it once for an unfortunately short period of time. If it's something that there's a 99% chance the other person is going to say 'oh yeah, duh' or 'sure, whatever' then it's just wasting both of your time to not just do it.
That said, I've had people get upset over merging their changes for them after a LGTM approval when I also find letting it sit to be a meaningless waste of time.
Interesting approach. I think it could have the reviewers to be more serious about their feedback. Comments are a bit too casual and may contain more "unconstructive" information.
I just this morning had someone "nitpick" on a PR I made and ask for a change that would have broken the code.
If the reviewer can make changes without someone reviewing their change, it's just waiting to blow up in. your face.
Yes, in the system I'm describing if a reviewer changed your code, you reviewed their change.
That sounds great. Was that proprietary tooling? I'd be interested in some such thing.
The tool (iron) isn't open source, but there are a bunch of public talks and blogs about how it works, many of which are linked from the github repo[1].
It used to be "open source" in that some of the code was available, but afaik it wasn't ever possible to actually run it externally because of how tightly it integrated with other internal systems.
[1] https://github.com/janestreet/iron
If I understood correctly, the same can be done on VS Code with the github plugins (for github PRs)
It's pretty straightforward: you checkout a PR, move around, and either make some edits (that you can commit and push to the feature branch) or add comments.
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Yeah, it's called git: make your own branch from the PR branch, commit and push the nitpick change, tell the author, and they can cherry-pick it if they approve.
Gitlab has this functionality right in the web UI. Reviewers can suggest changes, and if the PR author approves, a commit is created with the suggested change. One issue with this flow it that's it doesn't run any tests on the change before it's actually in the PR branch, so... Really best for typos and other tiny changes.
Alternatively you actually, you know, _collaborate_ with the PR author, work it out, run tests locally and/or on another pushed branch, and someone then pushes a change directly to the PR.
The complaints about nitpicks slowing things down too much or breaking things sound like solo-hero devs who assume their god-like PRs should be effectively auto-approved because how could their code even contain problems... No wonder they love working with "Dr Flattery the Always Wrong Bot".
*(Hilarious name borrowed from Angela Collier)
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Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker.
On the other hand, if it's less important code or the renaming is not clearly an improvement it can be quite useless. But I've met some developers who has the opinion of reviews as pointless and just say "this works, just approve it already" which can be very frustrating when it's a codebase with a lot of collaboration.
Naming comments are useful when someone catches something like:
1. you are violating a previously agreed upon standard for naming things
2. inconsistent naming, eg some places you use "catalog ID" and other places you use "item ID" (using separate words and spaces here because case is irrelevant).
3. the name you chose makes it easy to conflate two or more concepts in your system
4. the name you chose calls into question whether you correctly understood the problem domain you are addressing
I'm sure there are other good naming comments, but this is a reasonable representation of the kinds of things a good comment will address.
However, most naming comments are just bike shedding.
If the person reading the code doesn't quickly understand what's going on from the name or finds the name confusing, the name is poor and should be changed. It is way too easy for the author to be caught up in their mental model and to be unaware of their implicit assumptions and context and choose a name that doesn't make sense.
The bigger problem is people who feel ownership of shared codebases tied to their ego and who get angry when people suggest changes to names and other bits of interfaces instead of just making the suggested change.
If you get code review feedback, the default answer is "Done" unless you have a strong reason not to. If it's not obvious whether the name suggested by the author or the reader is better, the reader's choice should be taken every time.
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I’ve seen this enough now to consider it a trope instead of a coincidence. There’s that one or two guys on the team who may be noteworthy in their math clever but only high school reading level, who use the same word in three parts of the code but use a different dictionary definition each time. They don’t see the big deal, they can keep it straight in their head, they insist. And if you can’t then you must be dumb instead of what you really are, which is sick of his bullshit.
Given enough time and rope, these parts of the code start to encroach on each other and the cracks start to show. There are definitely bugs the smart guy introduces because no, in fact, you can’t keep them straight in your head either.
So it does matter if you use, as a top of my head example, the word “account” for both the user and group management features of the app and to describe an entry to an incident report in another part. It will bite you in the ass, and it’s easier to change now when there are three references instead of 23.
> Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker.
yes but it can be severely diminishing returns. Like lets step back a second and ask ourselves if:
var itemCount = items.Count;
vs
var numberOfItems = items.Count;
is ever worth spending the time discussing, versus how much of a soft improvement it makes to the code base. I've literally been in a meeting room with three other senior engineers killing 30 minutes discussing this and I just think that's a complete waste of time. They're not wrong, the latter is clearer, but if you have a PR that improves the repo and you're holding it back because of something like this, then I don't think you have your priorities straight.
Generally you’d like the variable to imply a call to action. Even if the call to action is for a feature still in the backlog.
Over time I’ve developed some tricks that invite people to add features to the code in the “right” place, and this is one of them. Once in a while someone gets credit for work I already thought to do but didn’t have time. But for every one of those there’s a half dozen or a dozen cases of increasing the bus number on a block of code I wrote be nerd sniping people into making additions while I’m busy with something else.
Sorry for the dumb question, is the second version actually better than the first? Because I prefer the first. But perhaps you chose this as a particularly annoying/unuseful comment
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A lot of these comments are not pointing out actual issues, just "That's not how I would have done it" type comments.
And the most amazing part is that we got a mini PR review in the comments to a single line of code someone posted just to show an example of useless debates :D
Human comments tend to be short and sweet like "nit: rename creatorOfWidgets to widgetFactory". Whereas AI code review comments are long winded not as precise. So even if there are 20 humans comments, I can easily see which are important and which aren't.
We are using BitBucket at work and decided to turn on RovoDev as reviewer. It absolutely doesn’t do that. Few but relevant comments are the norm and when we don’t like something it says we tell it in its instructions file to stop doing that. It has been working great!
My coworker is so far on this spectrum it's a problem. He writes sentences with half the words missing making it actually difficult to understand what he is trying to suggest.
All of the non critical words in english aren't useless bloat, they remove ambiguity and act as a kind of error correction if something is wrong.
it "nit" short for nitpick? I think prefixing PR comments with prefixes like that is very helpful for dealing with this problem.
Yes, but I don't know how effective it is. 99% of the time someone leaves a 'nit' the other person fixes it. So we're still dealing with most of them like regular comments. Only once or twice I've been like "nah, I like my way better" but I can only do that if they also leave an LGTM. Sometimes they do. There's one or two people that will hold your code hostage until you reply to every little nit. At that point they don't feel like nits. I always LGTM if the code is functionally correct or if the build breaks in a trivial way (that would also block them from submitting). Then they can address my nits or submit anyway and I'm cool with that.
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Yes it is. I've really oijed those convention at places I've worked. It probably wouldn't be too hard to instruct AI's to use this format too.
If you're interested: https://conventionalcomments.org/
It may feels to many. I mostly use suggestion, thought, and todo. When I type down "nit..." I realized it usually does not worth it. I'd rather make comment about higher level of the changes.
Depends on what you're targeting
- If it's a rough PR, you're looking for feedback on direction rather than nitpicks.
- If it's in a polished state, it's good to nitpick assuming you have a style guide you're intending to adhere to.
Perhaps this can be provided in the system prompt?
You can do both.
The noise is often what hides the bug in the first place. Aim for more straightforward code and the bug will often surface.
For a while when Node was switching to async from promise chains, people would bring me code or tests that were misfiring and they couldn’t tell why. Often it was because of either a bug in the promise chaining or someone tried to graft async code into the chain and it was an impedance mismatch.
I would start them by asking them to make the function fully async and then come back. About half the time the code just fixed itself. Because the intention of the code was correct, but there was some subtle bookkeeping or concurrency issue that was obfuscated. About a quarter of the time the bug popped out and the dev fixed it. And about a quarter of the time there was a legitimate bug that had been sleeping. The function was fine ones own, but something it called was broken.
There are a lot of situations like that out there. The code distracts from the real problem, but just fixing the “real problem” is a disservice because another real problem will happen later. Make the change easy. That’s always the middle of the solution.
Let me throw something out there: poor naming obscures and distracts from functional issues. You are right about a good reviewer, but a good author strives for clarity in addition to correctness.
As an aside, naming is highly subjective. Like in writing, you tailor naming to the problem domain and the audience.
This is why you should set guidelines for reviews (like e.g. https://go.dev/wiki/CodeReviewComments), and ideally automate as much as possible. I'm guilty of this as well, leaving loads of nitpicky code style comments - but granted, this was before Prettier was a thing. In hindsight, I could've spent all that time building a code formatter myself lol.
If you are nitpicking style or conventions that do not have rules in your linting tools, then those should automatically be non-issues, IMO.
I follow a consistent comment pattern[0] that makes blocking vs non-blocking easy to identify.
[0]: https://conventionalcomments.org/
Don't get me started on not CamelCasing acronyms, acronyms aren't more important than regular words! :)
Yeah or worse like my boss. We don't have a style guide. But he always wants style changes in every PR, and those style changes are some times contradictory across different PRs.
Eventually I've told him "if your comment does not affect performance or business logic, I'm ignoring it". He finally got the message. The fact that he accepted this tells me that deep down he knew his comments were just bike shedding.
I've been in teams like this - people who are lower on the chain of power get run in circles as they change to appease one, then change to appease another then change to go back to appease the first again.
Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand.
As the other responder recommends, a style guide is ideal, you can even create an unofficial one and point to it when conflicting style requests are made
> Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand.
Yes!! Exactly. When it comes to my PRs, he once made this snarky comment about him having high expectations in terms of code quality. When it comes to his PRs, he does the things he tells me not to do. In fact, I once sent him a "dis u?" with a link to his own code, as a response to something he told me I shouldn't do. To his credit he didn't make excuses, he responded "I could've done better there, agreed".
In general he's not bad, but his nitpicking is bad. I don't really understand what's going on in his mind that drives this behavior, it's weird.
You should have a style guide, or adopt one. Having uniform code is incredibly valuable as it greatly reduces the cognitive load of reading it. Same reason that Go's verbose "err != nil" works so well.
Style guidelines should be enforced automatically. Leaving that for humans to verify is a recipe for conflict and frustration.
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At augment code we specifically build our code review tool to find noise to signal ratio problem. In benchmark our comments are 2 to 3x more likely to get fixed compared to bugbot coderabbit etc
You should check it at Augmentcode.com