Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
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Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
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Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#2Not 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.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#3Not 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.
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.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#4Not 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.
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.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#5Not 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.
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.
Exactly. Even if I hammer the erstwhile reviewer with Teams/Slack messages to get it moved to the top of the queue and finished before the 5 hours are up, then all the other reviews get pushed down. It averages out, and the review market corrects.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#6Not 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.
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.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#7If you save 3 hours building something with agentic engineering and that PR sits in review for the same 30 hours or whatever it would have spent sitting in review if you handwrote it, you’re still saving 3 hours building that thing.
So in that extra time, you can now stack more PRs that still have a 30 hour review time and have more overall throughput (good lord, we better get used to doing more code review)
This doesn’t work if you spend 3 minutes prompting and 27 minutes cleaning up code that would have taken 30 minutes to write anyway, as the article details, but that’s a different failure case imo
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#8I find to be true for expensive approvals as well.
If I can approve something without review, it’s instant. If it requires only immediate manager, it takes a day. Second level takes at least ten days. Third level trivially takes at least a quarter (at least two if approaching the end of the fiscal year). And the largest proposals I’ve pushed through at large companies, going up through the CEO, take over a year.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#9As they say: an hour of planning saves ten hours of doing.
You don't need so much code or maintenance work if you get better requirements upfront. I'd much rather implement things at the last minute knowing what I'm doing than cave in to the usual incompetent middle manager demands of "starting now to show progress". There's your actual problem.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#10Not 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.
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.