Comment by necovek
4 hours ago
> Part of the problem is that you don't have access to the author's mental model for non-trivial changes and have to reconstruct it, otherwise your understanding of the program logic will be inadequate.
I actually believe the opposite: exactly the fact that a reviewer had to develop a mental model independently is why code review is and remains valuable (and why people use different models when doing agentic reviews).
The biggest value of doing code reviews is in ensuring maintainability of the code (1. someone else can understand it, 2. it is readable and 3. can be evolved in the future) — everything else is downstream from that.
> I actually believe the opposite: exactly the fact that a reviewer had to develop a mental model independently is why code review is and remains valuable (and why people use different models when doing agentic reviews).
I don't think we actually disagree here. I also think it is valuable, but it's also what often makes it difficult.
> The biggest value of doing code reviews is in ensuring maintainability of the code (1. someone else can understand it, 2. it is readable and 3. can be evolved in the future) — everything else is downstream from that.
Agree very much with that (with the slight caveat that it is not always the biggest value, just an important one).
> exactly the fact that a reviewer had to develop a mental model
But do they? In my experience, at most workplaces it's simply a meat linter phase with the occasional useless comment about style (which should probably be handled by proper CI/CD).
Like if you don't even check out the code (generalized 'you'), then they can hardly build up that model. And even checked out, viewed in its proper context, Naur's famous paper comes to mind - the author who wrote it is the only one who has properly built the theory (which might have included alternative implementations that failed but have no visible artifact).
I'm not claiming that there are no places that go absolutely above and beyond with their review sessions, but I would argue it's really rare - and AIs are great at figuring out some of the context the PR description lacks.
People say one thing and do another. It’s tiring. Long before LLMs we had the joke that a PR with 10 lines changes got 10 comments (all nitpicking), a PR with 1000 lines got just one, LGTM. We’ve had several bugs where PR review would almost certainly never catch the issue, people are terrible at reviewing things thoroughly. Guess what can do that much much better?
What you describe sounds like little more than rubber stamping a PR target than reviewing it.. I see it too, but I don’t thing we should double down on it just because it’s common