Comment by xmprt
12 days ago
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.
I wonder if there's a psychological benefit though. If someone states up front that they know something is just a nitpick, the author might be less likely to push back, and therefore it's less likely to end up in a bike shedding back-and-forth.
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> 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.
If the comment must be addressed before the review is approved, then it is not a nit, it is a blocker (a "changes required"). Blockers should not be marked as nits — nor vice versa.
I agree that prefixing comments with "Nit:" (or vice versa in extreme cases "This is a big one:") is psychologically useful. Yet another reason it's useful is that it's not uncommon for perceived importance to vary over time: you start with "hmm, this could be named blah" and a week later you've convinced yourself it's a blocker — so, force yourself to recognize that it was originally phrased as a nit, and force yourself to come back and say explicitly "I've changed my mind: I think this is important." With or without the "nit/blocker" prefixing pattern, the reviewer may come off as capricious; but with the pattern, he's at least measurably capricious.
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.