alt Hacker News> but the signal to noise ratio is poor
Nail on the head. Every time I've seen it applied, its awful at this. However this is the one thing I loathe in human reviews as well, where people are leaving twenty comments about naming and then the actual FUNCTIONAL issue is just inside all of that mess. A good code reviewer knows how to just drop all the things that irk them and hyperfocus on what matters, if there's a functional issue with the code.
I wonder if AI is ever gonna be able to conquer that one as its quite nuanced. If they do though, then I feel the industry as it is today, is kinda toast for a lot of developers, because outside of agency, this is the one thing we were sorta holding out on being not very automatable.
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Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker.
On the other hand, if it's less important code or the renaming is not clearly an improvement it can be quite useless. But I've met some developers who has the opinion of reviews as pointless and just say "this works, just approve it already" which can be very frustrating when it's a codebase with a lot of collaboration.
Yeah or worse like my boss. We don't have a style guide. But he always wants style changes in every PR, and those style changes are some times contradictory across different PRs.
Eventually I've told him "if your comment does not affect performance or business logic, I'm ignoring it". He finally got the message. The fact that he accepted this tells me that deep down he knew his comments were just bike shedding.
Human comments tend to be short and sweet like "nit: rename creatorOfWidgets to widgetFactory". Whereas AI code review comments are long winded not as precise. So even if there are 20 humans comments, I can easily see which are important and which aren't.
at my last job code review was done directly in your editor (with tooling to show you diffs as well).
What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This was typically a big shock for new hires who were used to the "comment for every nitpick" system; I think it can feel insulting when someone changes your feature. But I quickly came to love it and can't imagine doing code review any other way now. It's so much faster!
I'm not sure how to tie this to AI code review tbh. Right now I don't think I'd trust a model's taste for when to change things and when to leave a comment. But maybe that'll change. I agree that if you automated away my taste for code it'd put me in a weird spot!