Thread

1. dimbletimbers · 1790559269 · focus · HN ↗

   A defense of human code review I wish I saw more often, especially in light of the concerns people have about cognitive/comprehension debt: comprehension redundancy. At the end, if taken seriously, at least two people understand how the feature works (even if that number is, on average, trending closer to between one and zero). Ideally at least one of the two also comes away with a better understanding of the wider system and how the feature fits into or stands out from that landscape.

   1. atomicnumber3 · 1790560581 · focus · HN ↗

      If only one person knows the code, then PR time isn't going to save you.

      I'm tech lead and I basically don't review PRs, and I tell people this, with a caveat - if you can tell me what you specifically want me to review, for what specific purpose, I'm happy to!

      So "can you review this bit for race conditions" is great, love it. This forces people to actually think about what in their code they should be suspicious of, if anything.

      "Can you review this" [link to PR] is getting a rubber stamp because humans have never been good enough at "just spotting bugs" to make this worth it and now any LLM is better than a human.

      And for the purpose of understanding - PR time is too late. I have not reviewed a PR ("for real") in a long time and yet I could tell you how every system my people have built works down to a very fine level of detail. And it's because _we talk to each other!_ We don't just chill in the same slack channel and code independently, we all value each others brains and want each others inputs because we know it will improve our product and we value what perspectives others will bring.

      Trying to learn via PR is a sad substitute for real collaboration and teamwork.

      1. 20k · 1790569941 · focus · HN ↗

         This is wild to read, I always review PRs and frequently find bugs or significant problems in them that get them bounced back

         1. onion2k · 1790578811 · focus · HN ↗

            That's a strong signal that your team isn't doing well. Significant problems should have been spotted at a software design stage, or raised in standups, or identified in a pairing session. The earlier you can find an issue the simpler it is to fix, so waiting until the last moment (e.g. PR) means you're spending far more time fixing issues than necessary.

            As for finding bugs, what happens if you miss them? Do they go out to production and potentially lose user data? Finding bugs in PR is a big problem. For a start it shows your automated tests aren't good enough, and secondly it shows the devs aren't checking their code works well enough.

            If you do them at all, PRs should be a gate for checking whether the code meets the team's quality bar, not if it even works. The team should be able to deliver working code without them.

            1. RHSeeger · 1790594077 · focus · HN ↗

               > That's a strong signal that your team isn't doing well. Significant problems should have been spotted at a software design stage, or raised in standups, or identified in a pairing session.

               This is a strong signal that you're looking at different things than a lot of people doing code reviews are.

               - Why are you using this api for this instead of this other one? We use the other one because it avoids a specific issue.

               - Your code isn't following the same patterns that we use in these places. It should be using the same patterns so that it's more obvious to anyone else that works on it

               - The name you gave this function/class/whatever doesn't accurately represent what it is for

               These are the kinds of things that are generally noticeable during a code review, and can make a big difference later on. And they're generally not going to be identified during standups and/or design.

               Pairing is an option, since it is (effectively) code review _while_ writing the code (with a certain amount of blinders on, so not quite as effective). That being said, I hate pairing, so it's certainly not on my recommendation list.

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