Comment by dominotw
6 hours ago
> I think senior engineers find it very difficult to give up on line-by-line review
i am pretty senior. I hate code reviews so much. They are so boring, easily the most tedious part of my job. Its such a chore. Who is clinging to line-by-line review. Ppl dont really give that much about their employers.
You don’t sound very senior.
Code review isn’t a quality gate, it’s a way to maintain shared understanding of a codebase.
Throwing out code review is equivalent to throwing your hands up and saying you don’t need to understand anything about what your code is doing in its black box.
I don’t think anyone on this forum is half as smart as they think they are, especially in terms of systems engineering a black box solution. Myself included. Someone needs to understand what’s going on inside the Widget Factory until we have full Artificial General Intelligence.
>Throwing out code review is equivalent to throwing your hands up and saying you don’t need to understand anything about what your code is doing in its black box.
I think that is what the C-suite is currently wanting out of our engineers. Prompt, don't write, maybe read a bit, don't stop, ship, ship, ship.
Is the C-suite ready to sack the engineers and prompt Claude themselves with their business requirements? Why not cut out the middlemen if that's how they now perceive engineers?
This will vary by company focus and size, but sometimes the C-suite just doesn't want to believe that software-engineering has important overlap with business-analysis or product-design.
So you’re not writing the code, and you’re not reviewing the code…
What exactly would you say it is you do around here?
I initially pivoted to fully automated code reviews, sometimes with a brief skim of things. I've been shifting back to mostly manual review. In the background I'll also run some agentic scans, and once I'm done I'll look to see what the agents had to say. And then I go back in by hand armed with that knowledge and verify it & come to my own conclusion.
Why? Because I started to run into way too many AI generated messes in codebases. The agents are really good at some things and complete ass at others.
> Who is clinging to line-by-line review.
It really depends on the context. A react button background color - meh - the critical part of the backend where a new 300ms delay will cost the company millions then yeah.
> the critical part of the backend where a new 300ms delay will cost the company millions then yeah.
If it is so critical, why don't we have tests and benchmarks for it?
Oh right, because "Greg the super-coder" never wrote any of this down and it lives in his head so he can be the arbiter of change.
It was toxic before agentic coding, it's still toxic now.
Document your systems. Add tests and benchmarks for what is important.
We've always known this, we have a dozen or more textbooks written about it. But we always gave it a pass because "Greg the super-coder" was producing more value than he was hurting.
That's no longer the case. Your best coder is now Opus or Astra
> If it is so critical, why don't we have tests and benchmarks for it?
Thats a fair point, but Ive seen LLMs modify the surrounding environment to “pass the test”
A human still has to be responsible at some point.
Good thing you reviewed the PR so you could catch the gap in Greg’s documentation and force him to write it before approving his PR!
> Your best coder is now Opus or Astra
No, that's our _fastest_ coder, which is a different thing than _best_
> he critical part of the backend where a new 300ms delay will cost the company millions then yeah.
If a performance regression like this isn't caught by an automated testing suite, you have made a horrible mistake.
Reviewing the PR gives you a chance to identify this gap in the performance regression suite.
1 reply →
> new 300ms delay will cost the company millions
these might be 1% typically
Absolutely. And also the idea that this is somehow the last bastion against introducing bugs? Maybe run a test
> Maybe run a test
One of those things made of code that we should neither be writing nor reviewing? Shouldn't I just assume that the LLM did that or whatever?
I hate code reviews, but I owe it to my coworkers that I know will read my PRs to review my own generated slop line by line. Most of these agents are still overly verbose and I'm in a situation where no, not every single edge case is relevant enough to warrant the additional loc or complexity introduced.