There's been a lot of talk about the purpose of code review recently. It makes sense in the face of AI. Heres a link that was submitted a little while ago: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/115096720350507897
And in response I wrote a non-exhaustive checklist of things that a code review can look for:
- Does it functionally achieve what it sets out to (as per tacker issue or PR description)?
- Does it have extraneous code? Leftover debug prints, private API keys etc...
- Does it have any obvious defects? Memory leaks, un-handled edge cases, security flaws, obsolete API calls, etc...
- Could it be more understandable? Add/remove abstractions, better variable/method names, more/less functional etc...
- Is the style consistent with the codebase and/or style guidelines?
- Are there obvious performance improvements? Hashset instead of list, lazy evaluations, etc...
- Is it sufficiently well tested?
I think LLMs are okay at most of these, and worst at the first.
There's been a lot of talk about the purpose of code review recently. It makes sense in the face of AI. Heres a link that was submitted a little while ago: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/115096720350507897
And in response I wrote a non-exhaustive checklist of things that a code review can look for:
- Does it functionally achieve what it sets out to (as per tacker issue or PR description)?
- Does it have extraneous code? Leftover debug prints, private API keys etc...
- Does it have any obvious defects? Memory leaks, un-handled edge cases, security flaws, obsolete API calls, etc...
- Could it be more understandable? Add/remove abstractions, better variable/method names, more/less functional etc...
- Is the style consistent with the codebase and/or style guidelines?
- Are there obvious performance improvements? Hashset instead of list, lazy evaluations, etc...
- Is it sufficiently well tested?
I think LLMs are okay at most of these, and worst at the first.
Missing my biggest issues as you ask the agents to do larger tasks with less up front planning.
Is there already a pattern or code on in in the existing codebase that handles this functionality,
Do we really need net new code to achieve this functionality?
Can existing code be extended or abstracted to more cleanly implement this feature or functionality.
- Do we want this? Cost/Benefit etc
- Is the change architecturally right?
Particularly the latter LLMs seem still pretty useless at.
Unfortunately this often represents the only feedback given by the people in those „higher“ positions.
„The indent is wrong here“
„Comments should end with a period“
Because this kind of feedback is and was always easy.
If you get feedback like that, it’s time for your team to get automated linting/formatting
Pangram check on the article: 94% of this text is AI
I couldn’t agree more. Code review is integral to engineering, to sharing system understanding, to building sustainable systems.
Something is missing in the new ai bot review paradigm we’ve all sleepwalked into.
I’ve been building Archme.io for this reason. PR reviews for the age of AI
I think this applies to the writing of code as well