alt Hacker NewsPR review sucks because engineers often don't optimise their code authoring for it. When they do it's a joy.
PR review of agent generated code sucks because agents are, in my experience, very poor at authoring for review. This makes sense because the review process is not represented in the resulting code artifact which is what they're trained on. Agents are always producing much larger changes than should be in a single step, and often touch unrelated code with poor judgement of whether it should be included or not.
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Agents are also controllable to a degree. How agents author PRs is now an engineering problem.
exactly. a great pr is a joy to review. we've found some success in agents generating static HTML walkthroughs that order the diffs in something other than GitHub's default alphanumeric ordering, but it can only go so far
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One thing that really bothers me about agents is they generate excessively long and detailed comments.
This sounds good for review. Except… the comments are never intent or trade-offs, they’re always the “what”, which the code then duplicates right after. Comments should be short, concise “why”. Often I look at code and think “hm this is odd, I wouldn’t have done it this way, is there some constraint I don’t know about?”
The comment should explain that, not what the code is doing. If I wanted to know what the code is doing I’d read the code!