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Code review can be better

tigerbeetle.com

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Re: Code review can be better

#71

Post by sfink »

jrowen wrote: post #51
godelski wrote: post #31

While I like the post and agree with everything the author talked about I find that this is not my problem. Despite having a similar workflow (classic vim user). The problem I have and I think a lot of others have too is that review just doesn't actually exist. LGTMs are not reviews, yet so common. I'm not sure there's even a tech solution to this class of problems and it is down to culture. LGTMs exist because it sa…

Part of the problem is that businesses treat reviewing as a second class citizen. It's not "actual work" so shouldn't be given preference, which excuses the LGTM style reviews. I've been out of the industry for a while but I felt this way years ago. As long as everybody on the team has coding tasks, their review tasks will be deprioritized. I think the solution is to make Code Reviewer a job and hire and pay for it,…

I don't see a lot of value in generic code reviewers. I want the reviewers to be actively engaged in writing somewhat related code themselves, otherwise the value of their opinions will decline over time.

As for prioritization... isn't it enough knowing that other people are blocked on your review? That's what incentivizes me to get to the reviews quickly.

I guess it's always going to depend a lot on your coworkers and your organization. If the culture is more about closing tickets than achieving some shared goal, I don't know what you could do to make things work.

Re: Code review can be better

#72

Post by gf000 »

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #35

If you want to remain relevant in the AI-enabled software engineering future, you MUST get very good at reviewing code that you did not write. AI can already write very good code. I have led teams of senior+ software engineers for many years. AI can write better code than most of them can at this point. Educational establishments MUST prioritize teaching code review skills, and other high-level leadership skills.

> AI can write better code than most of them can at this point

So where is your 3 startups?

Re: Code review can be better

#73

Post by Maxion »

cedws wrote: post #66
koolba wrote: post #14

> When I review code, I like to pull the source branch locally. Then I soft-reset the code to mere base, so that the code looks as if it was written by me. This is eerily similar to how I review large changes that do not have a clear set of commits. The real problem is working with people that don’t realize that if you don’t break work down into small self contained units, everybody else is going to have to do it ind…

Crafting good commits, and good PRs out of those commits is a skill just like how writing good code is. Unfortunately, too many people suck at the former.

This does also tie in directly with tickets and the overall workflow the team has. I find this to have a huge effect on how managable PRs are. I feel the majority of devs are quite oblivious to the code they produce, they simply keep coding untill they fill the acceptence criteria. No matter if the result is 200 lines in 1 file, or 1 000 lines in 30 files.

Re: Code review can be better

#74

Post by opium_tea »

benrutter wrote: post #69
Areibman wrote: post #46

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow. Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

What did you like so much about DevOps? I use it every day and don't have any issues with the review system, but to me it's very similar to github. If anything, I miss being able to suggest changes and have people click a button to integrate them as commits.

That suggestion feature actually exists on ADO. It was introduced in the last year or so.

Re: Code review can be better

#75

Post by gf000 »

wfhrto wrote: post #48
kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #35

If you want to remain relevant in the AI-enabled software engineering future, you MUST get very good at reviewing code that you did not write. AI can already write very good code. I have led teams of senior+ software engineers for many years. AI can write better code than most of them can at this point. Educational establishments MUST prioritize teaching code review skills, and other high-level leadership skills.

AI can review code. No need for human involvement.

For styling and trivial issues, sure. And if it's free, do make use of it.

But it is just as unable to properly reason about anything slightly more complex as when writing code.

Re: Code review can be better

#76

Post by pjmlp »

I never did proper code review, other than when being lucky that we got a team of top devs in specific projects.

More often than not, it either doesn't exist, or turns out in a kind of architecture fetishism that the lead devs/architects have from conferences or space ship enterprise architecture.

Already without this garbage it feels so much better, than arguing about SOLID, clean code, hexagonal architecture, member functions being with an underscore, explicit types or not,...

Re: Code review can be better

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #39
netghost wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about AI can write large amounts of code that might look good out of context.

Yeah, LLMs can do that very well, IMO. As an experienced reviewer, the "shape" of the code shouldn't inform correctness, but it can be easy to fall into this pattern when you review code. In my experience, LLMs tend to conflate shape and correctness.

> As an experienced reviewer, the "shape" of the code shouldn't inform correctness, but it can be easy to fall into this pattern when you review code.

For human written code, shape correlates somewhat with correctness, largely because the shape and the correctness are both driven by the human thought patterns generating the code.

LLMs are trained very well at reproducing the shape of expected outputs, but the mechanism is different than humans and not represented the same way in the shape of the outputs. So the correlation is, at best, weaker with the LLMs, if it is present at all.

This is also much the same effect that makes LLMs convincing purveyors of BS in natural language, but magnified for code because people are more used to people bluffing with shape using natural language, but churning out high-volume, well-shaped, crappy substance code is not a particularly useful skill for humans to develop, and so not a frequently encountered skill. And so, prior to AI code, reviewers weren't faced with it a lot.

Re: Code review can be better

#78

Post by Areibman »

benrutter wrote: post #69
Areibman wrote: post #46

The biggest grip I have with Github is the app is painfully slow. And by slow, I mean browser tab might freeze level slow. Shockingly, the best code review tool I've ever used was Azure DevOps.

What did you like so much about DevOps? I use it every day and don't have any issues with the review system, but to me it's very similar to github. If anything, I miss being able to suggest changes and have people click a button to integrate them as commits.

Commenting feels so much better. You can comment on entire files, and you can leave review comments that actually "block" (rather than just get appended to the conversation)

Re: Code review can be better

#79

Post by _kidlike »

me and my team have been doing code reviews purely within IntelliJ, for something like 6 years. We started doing it "by hand", by checking out the branch and comparing with master, then using Github for comments.

Now there's official support and tooling for reviews (at least in IDEA, but probably in the others too), where you also get in-line highlighting of changed lines, comments, status checks, etc...

I feel sorry for anyone still using GitHub itself (or GitLab or whatever). It's horrible for anything more than a few lines of changes here and there.

Re: Code review can be better

#80

Post by abenga »

faangguyindia wrote: post #59
nop_slide wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m considered one of the stronger code reviewers on the team, what grinds my gears is seeing large, obviously AI heavy PRs and finding a ton of dumb things wrong with them. Things like totally different patterns and even bugs. I’ve lost trust that the person putting up the PR has even self reviewed their own code and has verified it does what they intend. If you’re going to use AI you have to be even more diligent a…

if you are seeing that it just means they are not using the tool properly or using the wrong tool. AI assisted commits on my team are "precise".

No True AI …
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