Comment by stillpointlab
5 hours ago
As a senior engineer that is struggling to give up line-by-line reviews, I agree with your take.
I've spent literal decades where one of the most valuable practices has been code reviews, for many dimensions. It is one of the best ways to ensure quality production releases. It is one of the best ways to transfer skill to junior engineers. It increases tribal knowledge throughout the engineering org by exposing others to systems they may not be working in. The number of benefits to a traditional human-centric engineering team is hard to overstate.
But I'm starting to feel that instead of starting at one extreme (heavy handed reviews) and moving towards less review, it probably makes more sense to start at the other extreme (no review at all) and move towards a brand new practice tailored for the new agentic reality.
It is looking increasingly likely that we don't need to modify code review for the agentic era, we need some completely new practice that hasn't yet been invented.
It's really about hamstringing the AIs so they can't write crap. Writing code is not a problem anymore, so anyone with an idea can write a script to do what they want. But if they try to connect two ideas together, now they have a data modeling problem. This is where everything seems to fail with AI coding (largely because the original author had the idea piecemeal).
The problem I have is non technical people now started submitting PRs. They are like the brain damage module on GLaDOS and somehow make opus generate actual broken slop. So I still have to be on my toes to catch that, but they generate such volumes of broken PRs that it takes time away from me doing real work.
Perhaps spec review in the custom of code review - it can even be via PR - so there is a bottleneck before anything is generated, instead of after. Cheap-to-produce code maybe isn't worth understanding line-by-line anymore.
I think spec review, which is definitely valuable, solves a different problem. One question to ask is "are we building the right thing", which a spec review definitely helps to answer.
But another question is "did we build what we planned, and did we build it to a high quality". Code review partially answered that question. Adversarial review is the closest we have to that in the automated LLM world, but I feel we need something better.
In the sense that ai-engineering specs (ie an elaborate prompt with skills etc.) can be said to be compiled into code language x maybe.....the spec is the new code?
> the new agentic reality
As a senior engineer, I think the code quality and review rigour slippage came well before AI. It's cultural, not technical. People just don't want to hear criticism anymore, they're thin skinned and weak minded, and they don't want to do the work to become strong. They want to be handed the answers and told they're doing great work, regardless of whether it's actually true.
Generative AI coding tools have just amplified this problem.
To be perfectly honest, whenever I detect this pathology in a junior my effort reviewing their code drops precipitously. There's just no point investing in an individual who doesn't want to work hard and learn. If my employer wants me to green light their vibeslopped garbage then I'll gladly oblige. Unfortunately this is the norm now.
Me being selfish.. I don't mind this.
I want every other firm to get weak whilst mines stays strong and wipe them out clean.