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Comment by pinkgolem

4 hours ago

What really important things are human reviews catching in your org?

I just feel more and more like the effort invested in manual reviews is not worth it

1. Does the implementation fit in the architecture/style of the project?

2. Are there potential security, accessibility, performance, etc. issues?

3. Domain specific knowledge (SQL, ASP.NET, XQuery, etc.) where there are better ways of solving a problem, or possible issues not handled.

4. Sense checking ... is the code easy to read? does it need an explanatory comment? does it need named parameters? etc.

1. Whether the thing should be done in the first place

2. If it's the correct solution on a high level

3. Whether it conflicts with or duplicates other parts of the system

4. Whether the comments are actually useful or restating the LLM chat

Also many others but these are the most common IME

  • All of these are angles an AI reviewer can test for as well, and will (IME) mostly catch mistakes correctly. I also still manually review code, and usually also catch issues, but the severity of what I find shrinks ever further as agents get better.

    The sprawling code comments are becoming the most draining part of code review though, that's really killing me from the inside.

    • > All of these are angles an AI reviewer can test for as well, and will (IME) mostly catch mistakes correctly.

      No, none of today's AI would give you enough signal around "should this thing be built in the first place" nor if it's the correct solution on a high level.

      They don't understand why you are doing what you are doing, and even if you explain it, they still don't actually understand the motivation and lots of other things.

      You'll get them to do guesses and pretend they actually know how to prioritize and will tell you it makes lots of sense, whatever they come up with. But try following it blindly and you'll see where you end up.

      This is why "one agent + one good developer" beats "thousands of agents working in a swarm" still today.

    • The AI review are still quite far from having the same level of critical thinking and high level knowledge of your application, what you have done in the past and want to do next etc.

      If you don't master this for your own project, what's even the point of your job.