No code reviews by default

plus, software engineering is a team sport, so if something works but is opaque, that's a fine thing to point out in a review, otherwise one runs the risk of being The "Foo Component" Owner™ and that's usually no fun and is for sure not healthy for any reasonably sized org

I am also a monster fan of the "Apply Suggestion" button in GitLab, which allows me to meet the reviewer half-way by even doing the legwork for the suggested change. If they agree, push button and we're back on track. It's suboptimal for any process that requires/encourages signed commits, but damn handy otherwise

On my team, the majority of code review comments are not discussing potential bugs, they're making sure everybody knows how the new thing works, why it was designed that way, implementation tradeoffs, etc. All that discussion is extremely valuable over the long run. For example, it means that nobody has to pay attention to email while they're on vacation in case something goes pear-shaped with a module they implemented.

That said, I 100% agree with the article's concluding paragraph about YMMV. Raycast is operating in an entirely different business domain from the one I'm in. It sounds like the reasons why Raycast likes their way of doing things don't really apply to us, and I don't think the reasons why we like our way of doing things don't really apply to Raycast.

"They all want to build the best product in the shortest time possible"

From my perspective, the "product" is not limited to what customers see or the code itself. It's the set of outcomes from the code being written and executed. For example... Do other engineers understand the code? Can they support it efficiently? Does it fail gracefully? What is the impact of failures? Are failures automatically detected? Does it lead to security breaches? Did the code author learn things they could do better that they didn't know to ask about? Did other engineers learn from reading the code or asking questions? Are customer requirements satisfied? How much is customers' trust impacted by failures, bugs, and feature that don't meet requirements? How big is your cloud provider bill? Etc...

If the priority is quickly delivering and iterating on features that satisfy customers' needs AND engineers will be supporting their own code, then the "No Code Review by Default" approach has its merits. In fact, I have personally found this approach to work well on constrained, isolated pilot projects where the priority is to unblock key scenarios for a limited set of customers and/or learn about customer needs before building a the "real" solution.

For anything else, I would suggest following the author's own advice: "ask yourself if the circumstances of others apply to you".

The situation can be very different in any of those aspects and mandatory review can still be a good idea. Are you building code that runs on surgery equipment together with 4 people you just met? I think you should probably have a formal review process. Or are you iterating towards an MVP for some webapp with a few people you consider friends? Lgtm just deploy to prod.