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Ask HN: Does a human still review your code?

8 points by stikit ago | 11 comments
Most of the code I work on is for internal company use at a small company and for personal projects. After experiencing painful code review processes where code was rewritten several times for what many times felt like arbitrary reasons to fit someone’s idea of a best practice, I am now on a team where code review is largely automated. I find Claude’s /review and /code-review are invaluable and do a more thorough code review than any human . For those of you who use AI to write the majority of your code, do you still have a human in the loop to do more than spot checks ?

shaftway |next [-]

Both. AI code review is built-in, but there's always a second human in the loop.

I'm concerned that there are people pushing on the code generation front, the code reviewing front, and the laziness front. Eventually they're going to all meet in the middle, and there will be a significant number of engineers who are using AI to write and review the code, rubber stamp it, and push it into prod, with disasterous results.

joshstrange |next |previous [-]

Personal/side-business: Almost fully automated PR review flow. Local agents review before PR, Github Actions runs Codex/Claude to review the PR, if everything passes (Unit, e2e, lint, etc) then I merge. I'll review critical code paths if they are touched but that's not too often.

Day Job: Similar but more human-in-the-loop and we are still feeling out "what needs human review" and "agent review is good enough".

LLM reviews have shown me/us that they will catch more things (legit things and silly things, to be fair) than human reviewers. Human reviewers are very bad at seeing what's _not_ there. Yes, humans will catch some things that the LLM won't but it's normally only on very custom things we've done that the LLM isn't "trained" on. [0]

I think that as time goes on code reviews will be almost fully automated and humans will focus more on the plans before building, overviews of what was built, and other spec/diagram-type "artifacts" than looking at the actual code.

[0] For my side projects and even a little for work I've been trending in the "do it the way the LLM wants" not "force it into the shape you thought of" because it's easier for the LLM to write/maintain/"understand". Similar to how I don't tell an LLM "put a red button on the page here that does X", I give it the problem I'm trying to solve so that I don't "bias" it to the way I first thought of. I may force it to do it "my way" in the end but I find I get exposed to new ideas or new/different ways to solve my problem when I don't "lead the witness".

wbnns |next |previous [-]

It depends on the areas of the codebase getting touched.

If something highly sensitive, yes, and in general, a tendency to review with more scrutiny on backend changes.

But for frontend, less and less every week.

gits997 |next |previous [-]

Not a code specific review - claude catches more than humans do.

But in cases where context lives in peoples heads, its hard for ai to know whats going on snd whats the main goal of this code chanhe.

if the context is given (or documented somewhere claude has access to) + context of company is not too big ti consume it, there is no use in human review imo.

spottedmarley |next |previous [-]

No code review here. I tried to make it a regular part of my work flow but, it didn't last. That being said, I'm a retired developer and everything I build are personal projects so the stakes are lower than for working developers. I retired just a year or two before AI coding agents came into existence so I never experienced using these tools in an actual workplace setting. Working must have a whole different vibe these days

sagabai |next |previous [-]

I wonder how codebases for important products (not demos or short-living ones) end up without anyone reviewing the code. Some claim engineers should become more of "architects" and "designers", but not coders/reviewers anymore. Wish to hear people's stories, if much documentation and reviewing from the high-level only is enough to keep the project from becoming a failure

stikit |root |parent [-]

If someone’s best practice,optimization or security check is that important, automate it. Automation is more scalable and consistent . It would make more sense to me to build purpose built agents to look for any patterns that matter. Yes, humans are needed to sanity check and design the agents and rules. Combine that with a well designed build and test harness , human code review seems to me to be obsolete.

ryanchants |next |previous [-]

Increasingly not. We use CodeRabbit at work, which catches good stuff. And I have my own gauntlet that I run code through.

https://github.com/jacquardlabs/gauntlet

firemelt |next |previous [-]

wow I think /review and /code-review just waste of token

stikit |root |parent [-]

what has your experience been and what are you using instead. Claude interactive agents are covered by the subscription fee so no api charges.

davedx |next |previous [-]

Nope. I occasionally do human review of my own code and very occasionally of other peoples', but for the most part it's all 100% automated. I use Codex's Github code review integration and it does a pretty decent job of spotting P1's and P2's.

neracu |next |previous [-]

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tmpsvc2695f5 |previous [-]

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