Comment by solyin
3 hours ago
> Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over.
Whatever the size of code review chosen, merging totally unreviewed code to prod is still totally insane. There are a few AI code review products out there. The one I've used is fairly decent at picking out issues, though there's definitely some shortcomings vs a human reviewer with additional context (especially since not everything is written down for the bot to access). So I wouldn't say they are over. Even though the AI review isn't perfect, we all know human reviews aren't either.
As AI improves it'll be able to hold more of the codebase as context, enabling better, quicker reviews.
Whether code review is inportant or not probably depends on whether the problem someone is solving is important or not. But when it is important, I think we should be putting the onus on the person who filed the PR instead of burning our own neurons trying to understand volumes of stuff. Tell me what you asked the AI to do. Why is that a good idea? Once I hear that answer (because many junior programmer ideas don’t even get past that point), let’s look at the code together. Tell me why you think the code you submitted does what you say. Did you look at the code? Did you write tests? Did you check for test coverage? Maybe you’re a little smarter than that. Did you think through pre- and post-conditions? Corner cases? Are certain undesirable behaviors impossible? How do you enforce that? Types? State machines?
Even before slop coding good code review was hard, because verification is a hard problem. But we have many tools at our disposal to increase confidence without having to go full-on mathematical proof. Human understanding has always been the bottleneck, and as long as the thing you are doing is for humans, humans will have good reasons to want to understand it, so they will remain the bottleneck. This is ok. It’s ok for humans to be the rate-limiter. But don’t go it alone and fry your own brain.
Yeah but who writes totally unreviewed code nowadays? Everyone I know doesn't commit until a model has reviewed the code that another model wrote.