alt Hacker NewsNot before coding agents nor after coding agents has any PR taken me 5 hours to review. Is the delay here coordination/communication issues, the "Mythical Mammoth" stuff? I could buy that.
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The PR won’t take 5 hours of work, but it could easily sit that long waiting for another engineer to willing to context switch from their own heads-down work.
The article specified wall clock time. One day turnaround is pretty typical if its not urgent enough to demand immediate review, lots of people review incoming PRs as a morning activity.
I've had PRs that take me five hours to review. If your one PR is an entire feature that touches the database, the UI, and an API, and I have to do the QA on every part of it because as soon as I give the thumbs up it goes out the door to clients? Then its gonna take a while and I'm probably going to find a few critical issues and then the loop starts again
Some devs interrupt what they are doing when they see a PR in a Slack notification, most don't.
Most devs set aside some time at most twice a day for PRs. That's 5 hours at least.
Some PRs come in at the end of the day and will only get looked at the next day. That's more than 5 hours.
IME it's rare to see a PR get reviewed in under 5 hours.
One pattern I've seen is that a team with a decently complex codebase will have 2-3 senior people who have all of the necessary context and expertise to review PRs in that codebase. They also assign projects to other team members. All other team members submit PRs to them for review. Their review queue builds up easily and average review time tanks.
Not saying this is a good situation, but it's quite easy to run into it.
The article is referring to the total time including delays. It isn’t saying that PR review literally takes 5 hours of work. It’s saying you have to wait about half a day for someone else to review it.