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If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

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Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#21

Post by sublinear »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #13
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-revie…

If you have a paid Copilot membership and a Github project you can request a code review from Copilot. And it doesn't do a terrible job, actually.

I will second this. I believe code review agents and search summaries are the way forward for coding with LLMs.

The ability to ignore AI and focus on solving the problems has little to do with "fun". If anything it leaves a human-auditable trail to review later and hold accountable devs who have gone off the rails and routinely ignored the sometimes genuinely good advice that comes out of AI.

If humans don't have to helicopter over developers, that's a much bigger productivity boost than letting AI take the wheel. This is a nuance missed by almost everyone who doesn't write code or care about its quality.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#22

Post by sothatsit »

rollulus wrote: post #16

I have received a few LLM produced PRs from peers from adjacent teams, in good faith but not familiar with the project, and they increasingly infuriate me. They were all garbage, but there’s a great asymmetry: it costs my peers nothing to generate them, it costs me precious time to refute them. And what can I do really? Saying “it’s irreparable garbage because the syntax might be right but it’s conceptually nonsense”…

This feels like a culture problem. I have seen higher-quality PRs as people use AI to review their work before pushing it. This means less silly typos and obvious small bugs.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#23

Post by rsynnott »

This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be notorious for this). I don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.” Now, you would, of course, think that your boss had gone crazy. No-one would expect this to produce good results. But somehow, stick ‘AI’ on this scenario, and a lot of people start to think “hey, maybe that could work.”

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#24

Post by AshamedCaptain »

No. The failure conditions of "AI agents" are not even close to classical human mistakes (the only one ones where code review has anything more than an infinitesimal chance to catch). There is absolutely no skill transfer and it is a poor excuse anyway since review was never going to catch anything anyway.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#25

Post by vrighter »

simonw wrote: post #18
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-revie…

> Where are the "code-review" agents at? OpenAI's Codex Cloud just added a new feature for code review, and their new GPT-5-Codex model has been specifically trained for code review: https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ Gemini and Claude both have code review features that work via GitHub Actions: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review... and https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/cl…

you can't use a system with the exact same hallucination problem to check the work of another one just like it. Snake oil

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#27

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rsynnott wrote: post #23

This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be…

That depends.

If the engineer, doing the implementation is top-shelf, you can get very good results from a “flawed” process (in quotes, because it’s not actually “bad.” It’s just a process that depends on the engineer being that particular one).

Silicon Valley is obsessed with process over people, manifesting “magical thinking” that a “perfect” process eliminates the need for good people.

I have found the truth to be in-between. I worked for a company that had overwhelming Process, but that process depended on good people, so it hired top graduates, and invested huge amounts of money and time into training and retention.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#28

Post by bcrosby95 »

vrighter wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are the "code-review" agents at? OpenAI's Codex Cloud just added a new feature for code review, and their new GPT-5-Codex model has been specifically trained for code review: https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ Gemini and Claude both have code review features that work via GitHub Actions: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review... and https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/cl…

you can't use a system with the exact same hallucination problem to check the work of another one just like it. Snake oil

I don't think it's that simple.

Fundamentally, unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice, it just so happens that they're different enough that failure in one tends to reveal a bug in another.

You can't reasonably state this won't be the case with tools built for code review until the failure cases are examined.

Furthermore a simple way to help get around this is by writing code with one product while reviewing the code with another.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#29

Post by sothatsit »

Getting AI to produce a bunch of code and then you having to filter through it all is a massive waste of time. The focus should be on getting AI to produce better code in the first place (e.g., using detailed plans), rather than on the volume of code you can produce...

I have only had real advantages with AI for helping me plan changes, and for it helping me to review my code. Getting it to write code for me has been somewhat helpful, but only for simple tedious changes or first drafts. But it is definitely not something I want to leverage by getting AI to produce more and more code that I then have to filter through and review. No thank you. I feel like this is really the wrong focus for implementing AI into your workflows.

Re: If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

#30

Post by KronisLV »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #10

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-revie…

> Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction.

Is it possible that this is just the majority and there’s plenty of folks that dislike actually starting from nothing and the endless iteration to make something that works, as opposed to have some sort of a good/bad baseline to just improve upon?

I’ve seen plenty of people that are okay with picking up a codebase someone else wrote and working with the patterns and architecture in there BUT when it comes to them either needing to create new mechanisms in it or create an entirely new project/repo it’s like they hit a wall - part of it probably being friction, part not being familiar with it, as well as other reasons.

> Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-review" agents at?

Presumably because that’s where the most perceived productivity gain is in. As for code review, there’s CodeRabbit, I think GitLab has their thing (Duo) and more options are popping up. Conceptually, there’s nothing preventing you from feeding a Git diff into RooCode and letting it review stuff, alongside reading whatever surrounding files it needs.

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