Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code
As AI accelerates code production beyond human review capacity, Rachel Laycock argues that code review has become a bottleneck and a crutch. Drawing on a panel discussion with Brian Houck of DX, she contends that the real value of review—knowledge sharing, mentoring, collective ownership—should be achieved earlier through pairing, design sessions, and automated checks. Instead of automating the review ceremony, she advocates 'review by exception' for high-risk changes, emphasizing that engineers need to understand systems, not diffs.
We need engineers to understand systems, not diffs.
- Arainach
This approach doesn't scale.
Pair programming once in a while can be incredibly valuable. I am glad to meet with anyone and talk over their code in person, brainstorm designs, run through a debugger together investigating it.
But if you asked me to do that for most of an 8 hour day - much less most of the time in general - I would quit the job faster than you could fill out the paperwork. Constantly having someone looking over your shoulder is a world of stress and overstimulation that I (and I suspect many others) will not stand for.
- wgreenberg
i do find it deeply funny that a polemic against peer review has an AI generated header image with easily identifiable problems (notebook contents upside down, one child is about to cut her hand with scissors, the other is building a geometrically impossible "lego" structure). if only it had been reviewed by someone else before publishing!
- singpolyma3
> If we want to explore alternative solutions, I’d rather do that before implementing one of them.
Sounds cute. But you won't know what any of them really are until you've built at least one of them. You can write specs and have meetings for years and you'll still miss something fundamental about the approach that will be discovered in the first hour of building.
- ramshanker
At this point, I haven't even read around 30% of the code base in my open source project. I know our works by my manual testing. AI keeps writing tests for itself, even though I don't explicity ask for it, and I am not complaining.
- humbleharbinger
For a second I thought this was Fowler posting but it's actually the CTO. Look if not reviewing code works I'm sure we'll see startups and new companies pushing it to the max.
I'm at a startup myself and we make judicious decisions about what to review and what doesn't need review. Our core systems go through code review - alignment is always built up early anyways.