alt Hacker News> I think senior engineers find it very difficult to give up on line-by-line review
i am pretty senior. I hate code reviews so much. They are so boring, easily the most tedious part of my job. Its such a chore. Who is clinging to line-by-line review. Ppl dont really give that much about their employers.
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So you’re not writing the code, and you’re not reviewing the code…
What exactly would you say it is you do around here?
I initially pivoted to fully automated code reviews, sometimes with a brief skim of things. I've been shifting back to mostly manual review. In the background I'll also run some agentic scans, and once I'm done I'll look to see what the agents had to say. And then I go back in by hand armed with that knowledge and verify it & come to my own conclusion.
Why? Because I started to run into way too many AI generated messes in codebases. The agents are really good at some things and complete ass at others.
Absolutely. And also the idea that this is somehow the last bastion against introducing bugs? Maybe run a test
> Who is clinging to line-by-line review.
It really depends on the context. A react button background color - meh - the critical part of the backend where a new 300ms delay will cost the company millions then yeah.
I hate code reviews, but I owe it to my coworkers that I know will read my PRs to review my own generated slop line by line. Most of these agents are still overly verbose and I'm in a situation where no, not every single edge case is relevant enough to warrant the additional loc or complexity introduced.
You don’t sound very senior.
Code review isn’t a quality gate, it’s a way to maintain shared understanding of a codebase.
Throwing out code review is equivalent to throwing your hands up and saying you don’t need to understand anything about what your code is doing in its black box.
I don’t think anyone on this forum is half as smart as they think they are, especially in terms of systems engineering a black box solution. Myself included. Someone needs to understand what’s going on inside the Widget Factory until we have full Artificial General Intelligence.