Comment by thih9
4 hours ago
> Today, when an engineer at Cloudflare opens a merge request, it gets an initial pass from a coordinated smörgåsbord of AI agents.
I’d prefer to have that happen as some sort of pre commit hook, before a merge request is sent. The feedback loop might be a bit faster and the process might produce less noise this way.
Like it or not, the "merge request" (eg, open a PR) is the Schelling point of relevant information. I expect that At scale here refers to size of software projects, and not only code velocity. Software projects of large enough size have CI configuration that don't typically fully-run on each dev machine.
My company has the AI review agents, and you can run them locally, but practically it’s easier to just open a merge request to have CI run the agents. Especially if you’re juggling a bunch of merge requests.
Valid, but you lose the lived history that comes with the audit log of it being actual review back and forth and CI runs vs lost to a developers machine and only a relic in the commit log. I can see both sides, though.
Can you elaborate about the practical value of having the history of back and forth, in a PR or even in the commit log? In my 20ish years of experience, I can’t recall a single instance where I’ve solved something thanks to having this work-in-progress state persisted in the repo history.
It’s exclusively been the other way around where having a smaller number of larger squished commits (post merge) that’s made the project be more maintainable.
It's not about having it in the commit history. I've seen a few cases where the back and forth revealed that the AI reviewer was offering bad advice (and a few others where I suspect bad local AI advice is why people keep sending me the same category of mistake).
People usually squash merge anyways
I have mixed feelings, but it boils down to how long it takes and / or cost.
Pre-commit hooks should be fast, as it's something you'd do (normally) a few dozen times a year. I don't believe sending a review job to a remote agent is fast, nor will waiting for a review to finish a commit be good for anyone.
CI on the other hand can be slower and runs async, it's fire and forget so you can switch tasks.
If noise is an issue, one possible solution is to create a merge request, have the tools review it, make the fixes, rewrite history like you did it perfectly the first time ("fix" commits are noise), then create a new one for human review.
Few dozen times a year?
You must have some pretty monster commits.