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There is an AI code review bubble

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Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#71

Post by johnsillings »

dakshgupta wrote: post #10
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

None of these tools perform particularly well and all lack context to actually provide a meaningful review beyond what a linter would find, IMO. The SOTA isn't capable of using a code diff as a jumping off point. Also the system prompts for some of them are kinda funny in a hopelessly naive aspirational way. We should all aspire to live and breathe the code review system prompt on a daily basis.

I agree that none perform _super_ well. I would argue they go far beyond linters now, which was perhaps not true even nine months ago. To the degree you consider this to be evidence, in the last 7 days, the authors of a PR has replied to a Greptile comment with "great catch", "good catch", etc. 9,078 times.

I like number of "great catches" as a measure of AI code review effectiveness

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#72

Post by victorbjorklund »

candiddevmike wrote: post #5

None of these tools perform particularly well and all lack context to actually provide a meaningful review beyond what a linter would find, IMO. The SOTA isn't capable of using a code diff as a jumping off point. Also the system prompts for some of them are kinda funny in a hopelessly naive aspirational way. We should all aspire to live and breathe the code review system prompt on a daily basis.

They 100% catch bugs in code I work on. Is it replacing human review fully? No, not yet. But it is a useful tool. Just like most of us wouldn’t do a code review without having tests, linters etc run first.

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#74

Post by segmondy »

If you give LLM a hammer everything looks like a nail, you give it a saw everything looks like wood. You ask LLM to find issues, it will find "issues" At the end of the day, you will have to fix those issues, if you decide to have another LLM fix those issues, by the time you are done with that cycle, you are going to end up with code that will be thoroughly over engineered.

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#75

Post by Quarrelsome »

zmmmmm wrote: post #70

My experience with using AI tools for code review is that they do find critical bugs (from my retrospective analysis, maybe 80% of the time), but the signal to noise ratio is poor. It's really hard to get it not to tell you 20 highly speculative reasons why the code is problematic along with the one critical error. And in almost all cases, sufficient human attention would also have identified the critical bug - so hu…

> but the signal to noise ratio is poor

Nail on the head. Every time I've seen it applied, its awful at this. However this is the one thing I loathe in human reviews as well, where people are leaving twenty comments about naming and then the actual FUNCTIONAL issue is just inside all of that mess. A good code reviewer knows how to just drop all the things that irk them and hyperfocus on what matters, if there's a functional issue with the code.

I wonder if AI is ever gonna be able to conquer that one as its quite nuanced. If they do though, then I feel the industry as it is today, is kinda toast for a lot of developers, because outside of agency, this is the one thing we were sorta holding out on being not very automatable.

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#76

Post by randusername »

This article surprised me. I would have expected it would be about how _human_ code review is unsustainable in the face of AI-enhanced velocity.

I would be interested to hear of some specific use-cases for LLMs in code review.

With static analysis, tests, and formatters I thought code review was mostly interpersonal at this point. Mentorship, ensuring a chain of liability in approvals, negotiating comfort levels among peers with the shared responsibility of maintaining the code, that kind of thing.

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#77

Post by storystarling »

gherkinnn wrote: post #42
candiddevmike wrote: post #5

None of these tools perform particularly well and all lack context to actually provide a meaningful review beyond what a linter would find, IMO. The SOTA isn't capable of using a code diff as a jumping off point. Also the system prompts for some of them are kinda funny in a hopelessly naive aspirational way. We should all aspire to live and breathe the code review system prompt on a daily basis.

Opus 4.5 catches all sorts of things a linter would not, and with little manual prompting at that. Missing DB indexes, forgotten migration scenarios, inconsistencies with similar services, an overlooked edge case. Now I'm getting a robot to review the branch at regular intervals and poking holes in my thinking. The trick is not to use an LLM as a confirmation machine. It doesn't replace a human reviewer. I don't see…

I came to the same conclusion and ended up wiring a custom pipeline with LangGraph and Celery. The markup on the SaaS options is hard to justify given the raw API costs. The main benefit of rolling it yourself seems to be the control over context retrieval—I can force it to look at specific Postgres schemas or related service definitions that a generic CI integration usually misses.

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#78

Post by raincole »

I still think any business that is based on someone else's model is worthless. I know I'm sounding like the 'dropbox is just FTP' guy, but it really feels like that any good idea will just be copied by OpenAI and Anthropic. If AI code review is proven a good idea is there any reason to expect Codex or Claude Code to not implement some commands to do code review?

Re: There is an AI code review bubble

#79

Post by bluGill »

raincole wrote: post #78

I still think any business that is based on someone else's model is worthless. I know I'm sounding like the 'dropbox is just FTP' guy, but it really feels like that any good idea will just be copied by OpenAI and Anthropic. If AI code review is proven a good idea is there any reason to expect Codex or Claude Code to not implement some commands to do code review?

The shakiest business model is one where you have no competition - if nobody else had the idea already: you are probably wrong - they did but it was a bad idea so they failed.

The real question is how can you compete. There are lots of answers here, but something new and good is rare.

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