alt Hacker Newsat my last job code review was done directly in your editor (with tooling to show you diffs as well).
What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This was typically a big shock for new hires who were used to the "comment for every nitpick" system; I think it can feel insulting when someone changes your feature. But I quickly came to love it and can't imagine doing code review any other way now. It's so much faster!
I'm not sure how to tie this to AI code review tbh. Right now I don't think I'd trust a model's taste for when to change things and when to leave a comment. But maybe that'll change. I agree that if you automated away my taste for code it'd put me in a weird spot!
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Was that Jane Street? I remember watching a presentation from someone there about such a system.
If not, any chance this tooling is openly available?
What if you have two people with different ideas of how to name a certain variable and they just flip the name back and forth every release?
I like this review method too though, and like that some pr review tools have a 'suggest changes' and 'apply changes' button now too
> What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This is my dream; have only had a team with little enough ego to actually achieve it once for an unfortunately short period of time. If it's something that there's a 99% chance the other person is going to say 'oh yeah, duh' or 'sure, whatever' then it's just wasting both of your time to not just do it.
That said, I've had people get upset over merging their changes for them after a LGTM approval when I also find letting it sit to be a meaningless waste of time.
I just this morning had someone "nitpick" on a PR I made and ask for a change that would have broken the code.
If the reviewer can make changes without someone reviewing their change, it's just waiting to blow up in. your face.
That sounds great. Was that proprietary tooling? I'd be interested in some such thing.
This is the workflow I've always dreamed of. In a lot of ways making a change which is then submitted as patch to their patch isn't really that different from submitting a comment to their patch. The workflow of doing that directly in editor is just wonderful.
If I had to pick, I actually think ONLY being able to submit "counter-patches" would be better than only being able to submit comments. Comments could just be actual programming language style comments submitted as code changes.
If minor mistakes are corrected without the PR author's input, do they ever learn to stop making those mistakes themselves? It seems like a system where you just never bother to learn, e.g., style conventions, because reviewers just apply edits as needed.