alt Hacker News> Today, when an engineer at Cloudflare opens a merge request, it gets an initial pass from a coordinated smörgåsbord of AI agents.
I’d prefer to have that happen as some sort of pre commit hook, before a merge request is sent. The feedback loop might be a bit faster and the process might produce less noise this way.
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My company has the AI review agents, and you can run them locally, but practically it’s easier to just open a merge request to have CI run the agents. Especially if you’re juggling a bunch of merge requests.
Valid, but you lose the lived history that comes with the audit log of it being actual review back and forth and CI runs vs lost to a developers machine and only a relic in the commit log. I can see both sides, though.
I have mixed feelings, but it boils down to how long it takes and / or cost.
Pre-commit hooks should be fast, as it's something you'd do (normally) a few dozen times a year. I don't believe sending a review job to a remote agent is fast, nor will waiting for a review to finish a commit be good for anyone.
CI on the other hand can be slower and runs async, it's fire and forget so you can switch tasks.
If noise is an issue, one possible solution is to create a merge request, have the tools review it, make the fixes, rewrite history like you did it perfectly the first time ("fix" commits are noise), then create a new one for human review.
Like it or not, the "merge request" (eg, open a PR) is the Schelling point of relevant information. I expect that At scale here refers to size of software projects, and not only code velocity. Software projects of large enough size have CI configuration that don't typically fully-run on each dev machine.