| ▲ | Quarrelsome 13 hours ago |
| > but the signal to noise ratio is poor Nail on the head. Every time I've seen it applied, its awful at this. However this is the one thing I loathe in human reviews as well, where people are leaving twenty comments about naming and then the actual FUNCTIONAL issue is just inside all of that mess. A good code reviewer knows how to just drop all the things that irk them and hyperfocus on what matters, if there's a functional issue with the code. I wonder if AI is ever gonna be able to conquer that one as its quite nuanced. If they do though, then I feel the industry as it is today, is kinda toast for a lot of developers, because outside of agency, this is the one thing we were sorta holding out on being not very automatable. |
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| ▲ | eieio 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| at 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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| ▲ | johntash 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | pbalau an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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? Fire both. There is no amount of skill and productivity that can justify that amount of pettiness. | |
| ▲ | ljm an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think it's a good idea to have a style guide of sorts that you can point to when people sweat the small stuff. |
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| ▲ | retired an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In my team we had ownership over a feature. We would build it ourself, someone would review it and then we would merge and deploy. If someone had their grubby hands all over the code I would no longer feel ownership and would not feel comfortable releasing it, as I wouldn't know how it would react in production with all the changes someone had made. I would at least have to run the full test-suite and manually test the new feature all over again. Or in other words: git revert
Just comment on the PR and leave a code suggestion that I can implement in one click. | |
| ▲ | Phlebsy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | zenolijo 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker. On the other hand, if it's less important code or the renaming is not clearly an improvement it can be quite useless. But I've met some developers who has the opinion of reviews as pointless and just say "this works, just approve it already" which can be very frustrating when it's a codebase with a lot of collaboration. |
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| ▲ | daotoad 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Naming comments are useful when someone catches something like: 1. you are violating a previously agreed upon standard for naming things 2. inconsistent naming, eg some places you use "catalog ID" and other places you use "item ID" (using separate words and spaces here because case is irrelevant). 3. the name you chose makes it easy to conflate two or more concepts in your system 4. the name you chose calls into question whether you correctly understood the problem domain you are addressing I'm sure there are other good naming comments, but this is a reasonable representation of the kinds of things a good comment will address. However, most naming comments are just bike shedding. | | |
| ▲ | Arainach 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | If the person reading the code doesn't quickly understand what's going on from the name or finds the name confusing, the name is poor and should be changed. It is way too easy for the author to be caught up in their mental model and to be unaware of their implicit assumptions and context and choose a name that doesn't make sense. The bigger problem is people who feel ownership of shared codebases tied to their ego and who get angry when people suggest changes to names and other bits of interfaces instead of just making the suggested change. If you get code review feedback, the default answer is "Done" unless you have a strong reason not to. If it's not obvious whether the name suggested by the author or the reader is better, the reader's choice should be taken every time. |
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| ▲ | Quarrelsome 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker. yes but it can be severely diminishing returns. Like lets step back a second and ask ourselves if: var itemCount = items.Count; vs var numberOfItems = items.Count; is ever worth spending the time discussing, versus how much of a soft improvement it makes to the code base. I've literally been in a meeting room with three other senior engineers killing 30 minutes discussing this and I just think that's a complete waste of time. They're not wrong, the latter is clearer, but if you have a PR that improves the repo and you're holding it back because of something like this, then I don't think you have your priorities straight. | | |
| ▲ | spooky_action 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sorry for the dumb question, is the second version actually better than the first? Because I prefer the first. But perhaps you chose this as a particularly annoying/unuseful comment | | |
| ▲ | Quarrelsome 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I personally don't give a shit either way but I've worked in dev shops with a clear preference for the second one. I can see their point because the code as natural language parses better but I don't think its strong enough to care about. Sort of place that is fussy about test naming so where I would do smth like: TestSearchCriteriaWhere they'd want Test_That_Where_Clauses_In_Search_Criteria_Work I think its a waste of typing but idk, I'm willing to let it slide because I think its a pointless hill to die on. | | |
| ▲ | tharkun__ 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Let's take it up a notch! var itemCount = items.Count;
depends on what `items` is, no? Is the `.Count` O(1)? Do you really need a variable or is it fine for the (JIT) compiler to take care of it? Is it O(n) and n is significant enough? Maybe you need a variable and spend time arguing about that name. Yes I chose this because almost everyone I know at least would argue you always have to create the variable (and then argue about the name) ;) fussy about test naming
I get fussiness about test naming. I believe that a good test "name" should tell you enough for you to be able to "double check" the test setup as well as the assertions against the test name with some sort of "reasonable" knowledge of the code/problem domain.As such both of those test names are really bad, because they can't tell anything at all about whether you're testing for the correct thing. How do I know that your assertions are actually asserting that it "works"? Instead, I'd want a test named something like this (assuming that that's what this particular test is actually about - i.e. imagine this particular test in the context of a user defined search, where one of the options is that they can specify a project to search by and this particular test is about verifying that we check the permissions the user has for said project. There would be different tests for each of the relevant where clauses that specifying a project in the search params would entail and different tests again for each of the other user specifiable parameters that result in one or more where clauses to be generated): shouldCheckProjectPermissionsWhenProjectIdInSearchParams()
Every single test case gives you the ability to specify both a good name and clear, concise test assertions. If I see anything but a bunch of assertions related to project permissions for the logged in user in this test, I will fight you tooth and nail on that test ;) I couldn't care less tho if you use camelCase or snake_case or whatever. I just had to choose something to post. I also couldn't care less if you had 17 different assertions in the test (we all know that "rule", right? I think the "test one thing" and "one assertion" is not about the actual number of "assert statements". People that think that, got the rule wrong. It's all about the "thing" the assertions test. If you have 17 assertions that are all relevant to testing the project permission in question then they're great and required to be there. If 1 is for asserting the project permissions and the other 16 are repeating all the other "generic assertions" we copy and pasted from previous tests, then they're not supposed to be there. I will reject such a PR every time. |
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| ▲ | solid_fuel 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If I was going to nitpick it I would point out that `itemsCount` could easily be confused with `items.Count`, or vice versa, depending on syntax highlighting. That kind of bug can have a negative impact if one or the other is mutated while the function is running. So clearly distinguishing the local `numberOfItems` from `items.Count` _could_ be helpful. But I wouldn't ping it in a review. | |
| ▲ | ambicapter 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They’re both equally bad to me, I don’t see the improvement over just using item.count. I may be nitpicking a toy example though. | | |
| ▲ | Quarrelsome 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think in this case itemCount had application in a couple of conditions later in the function, so there was value in extracting the count. In my recollection I might be missing some nuance, lets say for the sake of argument it was: var relevantCount = items.Where(x => x.SomeValue > 5); vs var numberOfRelevantItems = items.Where(x => x.SomeValue > 5); so it wasn't necessarily cheap enough to want to repeat. |
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| ▲ | SchemaLoad 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A lot of these comments are not pointing out actual issues, just "That's not how I would have done it" type comments. | | |
| ▲ | brabel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | And the most amazing part is that we got a mini PR review in the comments to a single line of code someone posted just to show an example of useless debates :D |
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| ▲ | Cthulhu_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is why you should set guidelines for reviews (like e.g. https://go.dev/wiki/CodeReviewComments), and ideally automate as much as possible. I'm guilty of this as well, leaving loads of nitpicky code style comments - but granted, this was before Prettier was a thing. In hindsight, I could've spent all that time building a code formatter myself lol. |
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| ▲ | causalscience 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah or worse like my boss. We don't have a style guide. But he always wants style changes in every PR, and those style changes are some times contradictory across different PRs. Eventually I've told him "if your comment does not affect performance or business logic, I'm ignoring it". He finally got the message. The fact that he accepted this tells me that deep down he knew his comments were just bike shedding. |
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| ▲ | zeroCalories 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You should have a style guide, or adopt one. Having uniform code is incredibly valuable as it greatly reduces the cognitive load of reading it. Same reason that Go's verbose "err != nil" works so well. | | |
| ▲ | brabel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Style guidelines should be enforced automatically. Leaving that for humans to verify is a recipe for conflict and frustration. |
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| ▲ | awesome_dude 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've been in teams like this - people who are lower on the chain of power get run in circles as they change to appease one, then change to appease another then change to go back to appease the first again. Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand. As the other responder recommends, a style guide is ideal, you can even create an unofficial one and point to it when conflicting style requests are made | | |
| ▲ | causalscience a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | > Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand. Yes!! Exactly. When it comes to my PRs, he once made this snarky comment about him having high expectations in terms of code quality. When it comes to his PRs, he does the things he tells me not to do. In fact, I once sent him a "dis u?" with a link to his own code, as a response to something he told me I shouldn't do. To his credit he didn't make excuses, he responded "I could've done better there, agreed". In general he's not bad, but his nitpicking is bad. I don't really understand what's going on in his mind that drives this behavior, it's weird. |
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| ▲ | catlifeonmars an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Let me throw something out there: poor naming obscures and distracts from functional issues. You are right about a good reviewer, but a good author strives for clarity in addition to correctness. As an aside, naming is highly subjective. Like in writing, you tailor naming to the problem domain and the audience. |
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| ▲ | tr_user 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Depends on what you're targeting - If it's a rough PR, you're looking for feedback on direction rather than nitpicks. - If it's in a polished state, it's good to nitpick assuming you have a style guide you're intending to adhere to. Perhaps this can be provided in the system prompt? |
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| ▲ | xmprt 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Human comments tend to be short and sweet like "nit: rename creatorOfWidgets to widgetFactory". Whereas AI code review comments are long winded not as precise. So even if there are 20 humans comments, I can easily see which are important and which aren't. |
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| ▲ | brabel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We are using BitBucket at work and decided to turn on RovoDev as reviewer. It absolutely doesn’t do that. Few but relevant comments are the norm and when we don’t like something it says we tell it in its instructions file to stop doing that. It has been working great! | |
| ▲ | SchemaLoad 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My coworker is so far on this spectrum it's a problem. He writes sentences with half the words missing making it actually difficult to understand what he is trying to suggest. All of the non critical words in english aren't useless bloat, they remove ambiguity and act as a kind of error correction if something is wrong. | |
| ▲ | Quarrelsome 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | it "nit" short for nitpick? I think prefixing PR comments with prefixes like that is very helpful for dealing with this problem. | | |
| ▲ | hdjrudni 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, but I don't know how effective it is. 99% of the time someone leaves a 'nit' the other person fixes it. So we're still dealing with most of them like regular comments. Only once or twice I've been like "nah, I like my way better" but I can only do that if they also leave an LGTM. Sometimes they do. There's one or two people that will hold your code hostage until you reply to every little nit. At that point they don't feel like nits. I always LGTM if the code is functionally correct or if the build breaks in a trivial way (that would also block them from submitting). Then they can address my nits or submit anyway and I'm cool with that. | |
| ▲ | simonbw 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes it is. I've really oijed those convention at places I've worked. It probably wouldn't be too hard to instruct AI's to use this format too. |
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| ▲ | knes 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| At augment code we specifically build our code review tool to find noise to signal ratio problem. In benchmark our comments are 2 to 3x more likely to get fixed compared to bugbot coderabbit etc You should check it at Augmentcode.com |
