Contradiction: I Like Code Review More Now
I spend a lot of time doing CR these days. At the moment it's one of those verification gates we have that's load bearing, and even with some automated testing and CR Invariant linting we are still doing a ton of Code Reading lately. However! I think this is actually probably the most fun time to do code review!
I Can Talk To Robots
Previously CR always felt kind of like "am I wasting somebody's time asking stupid questions in a PR?" But I've actually found that often it's stupid questions and "wait, really?" style review that can at once feel kind of personally insulting and also heavily rewarding if you can hit CR with an egoless process (hard). Often it's pointing out the blindingly obvious where CR's highest alpha is, and, well:
- Nobody wants to be the "well duh" guy
- Nobody wants to be the "umm... really?" guy
But now I can just ask robots braindead galaxy-brain style questions like "why is this inline style like this and not a custom component?" and software like Code Rabbit (not sponsored but we use them at work, it's great) will respond to my question immediately and with interesting feedback. The pace of agentic development also means we can very quickly pivot code comments into actionable changes that make a PR tight and well-built, with new optional directions to address tech debt, to resolve tech debt quickly, and to provide new work to address budding tech debt. It's actually really interesting and worth our time as an engineering department to ask dumb questions now, because we get all sorts of new ideas and perspective on how to build things better, mostly because there literally are no dumb questions anymore. Only dumb answers.
It does require a careful eye to catch dumb answers, though. That's worth a second thought.