Reviewing things is fast and smooth is things are small. If you have all the involved parties stay in the loop, review happens in the real time. Review is only problematic if you split the do and review steps. The same applies to AI coding, you can chose to pair program with it and then it's actually helpful, or you can have it generate 10k lines of code you have no way of reviewing. You just need people understand that switching context is killing productivity. If more things are happening at the same time and your memory is limited, the time spent on load/save makes it slower than just doing one thing at the time and staying in the loop.
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
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Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#72But you can’t just not review things! Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team wh…
I never review PRs, I always rubber-stamp them, unless they come from a certified idiot: 1. I don't care because the company at large fails to value quality engineering. 2. 90% of PR comments are arguments about variable names. 3. The other 10% are mistakes that have very limited blast radius. It's just that, unless my coworker is a complete moron, then most likely whatever they came up with is at least in acceptable…
I'm very surprised by these comments...
I regularly review code that is way more complicated that it should.
The last few days I was going back and forth on reviews on a function that had originally cyclomatic complexity of 23. Eventually I got it down to 8, but I had to call him into a pair programming session and show him how the complexity could be reduced.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#73I don’t agree that AI can’t fix this. It is too easy to dismiss.
With AI my task to review is to see high level design choices and forget reviewing low level details. It’s much simpler.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#74Reviewing things is fast and smooth is things are small. If you have all the involved parties stay in the loop, review happens in the real time. Review is only problematic if you split the do and review steps. The same applies to AI coding, you can chose to pair program with it and then it's actually helpful, or you can have it generate 10k lines of code you have no way of reviewing. You just need people understand t…
Honestly if I'm just following what a single LLM is doing I'm arguably slower than doing it myself so I'd say that approach isn't very useful for me.
I prefer to review plan (this is more to flush out my assumptions about where something fits in the codebase and verify I communicated my intent correctly).
I'll loosely monitor the process if it's a longer one - then I review the artifacts. This way I can be doing 2/3 things in parallel, using other agents or doing meetings/prod investigation/making coffee/etc.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#75In my experience a culture where teammates prioritise review times (both by checking on updates in GH a few times a day, and by splitting changes agressively into smaller patches) is reflected in much faster overall progress time. It's definitely a culture thing, there's nothing technically or organisationally difficult about implementing it, it just requires people working together considering team velocity more important than personal velocity.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#76Not 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.
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.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting too much trust in an agent is definitely a problem, but I have to admit I've written about a dozen little apps in the past year without bothering to look at the code and they've all worked really well. They're all just toys and utilities I've needed and I've not put them into a production system, but I would if I had to. Agents are getting really good, and if you're used to planning and designing up front you…
>> Putting too much trust in an agent is definitely a problem, but I have to admit I've written about a dozen little apps in the past year without bothering to look at the code and they've all worked really well. They're all just toys and utilities I've needed and I've not put them into a production system, but I would if I had to. I have been doing this to, and I've forgotten half of them. For me the point is that t…
Deepseek v3.2 tokens are $0.26/0.38 on OpenRouter. That model - released 4 months ago - isn't really good enough by today's standards, but its significantly stronger than Opus 4.1, which was only released last August! In 12 months I think its reasonable to expect there will be a model with less cost than that which is significantly stronger than anything available now.
And no, it isn't ONLY because VC capital is being burned to subsidize cost. That is impossible for the dozen smaller providers offering service at that cost on OpenRouter who have to compete with each other for every request and also have to pay compute bills.
Qwen3.5-9B is stronger than GPT-4o and it runs on my laptop. That isn't just benchmarks either. Models are getting smaller, cheaper and better at the same time and this is going to continue.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen engineers I respect abandon this way of working as a team for the productivity promise of conjuring PRs with a coding agent. It blows away years of trust so quickly when you realize they stopped reviewing their own output.
Perhaps due to FOMO outbreak[1], upper management everywhere has demanded AI-powered productivity gains, based on LoC/PR metrics, it looks like they are getting it. 1. The longer I work in this industry, the more it becomes clear that CxO's aren't great at projecting/planning, and default to copy-cat, herd behaviors when uncertain.
Would love to be a fly on the wall for a couple of months to see what corporate CxO's actually do.
Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin. Probably wouldn't be a massively successful one, but good enough to survive 2 years and have millions in the bank for that, or get fired and get a golden parachute.
(half) joking - most likely I'm massively trivializing the role.
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#79> Code a simple bug fix 30 minutes > Get it code reviewed by the peer next to you 300 minutes → 5 hours → half a day Is it takes 5 hours for a peer to review a simple bugfix your operation is dysfunctional.
nobody will immediately jump on your code review
Re: Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
#80In my experience, good mature organisations have clear review processes to ensure quality, improve collaboration and reduce errors and risk. This is regardless of field. It does slow you down - not 10x - but the benefits outweigh the downsides in the long run.
The worst places I’ve worked have a pattern where someone senior drives a major change without any oversight, review or understanding causing multiple ongoing issues. This problem then gets dumped onto more junior colleagues, at which point it becomes harder and more time consuming to fix (“technical debt”). The senior role then boasts about their successful agile delivery to their superiors who don’t have visibility of the issues, much to the eye-rolls of all the people dealing with the constant problems.