I woke up one day and the industry is gating all code changes behind PRs w/ approvals. Anyone still able to commit to main without approval from someone else? I’m even seeing companies require multiple approvals on every PR. It’s insanity.

I’m skeptical. Software is as buggy as it ever was. I come across teams shipping terrible quality software, where every line change was approved and reviewed. I come across teams that require every change have an approval, but don’t require 100% test coverage. I’m seeing senior engineers have to get approval from juniors for a copy change.

It’s theatre. It’s bad management. It’s a cargo cult. It isn’t actually driving code quality.

Code review is one thing. Code review is good. But requiring every change have an approval is something else.

There's two kinds of reviews in my experience:

1. Does it work? Then ship it. This is great for early on, high-velocity where the goal is to get something working in the wild. AI and AI proponents love this option. It's easy to spot obvious problems, but very unlikely to lead to feedback on structural changes to abstractions and architecture to increase overall _long-term_ velocity.

2. We assume this works, but is it "correct"? This is where long-term code maintainability is created. The quality and effort put into a review like this is obviously far more involved than option 1. People working long term on a code base love this option.

We've been biased towards #1 for a long time, but I feel like we dont have enough people capable of doing #2.

exactly, the kind of reviews which have a point are the ones you do before starting work. But that's a design review, not a code review. My team does "commit to master", although I did catch a fair few regressions by looking at the committed code.... but as long as it doesn't go live, who cares?