If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks. Large dumps of code are basically unreviewable by humans, but it seems like a lot of people have forgotten about that when it comes to LLMs.

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roncesvalles 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You aren't allowed to block PRs for being too large anymore. The objective that every engineer should be 2x/3x/5x more productive can only be achieved if you go totally lax on code reviews.

Because if all your SWEs produce 5x more code, it also means they have to review 5x more code. But LLMs don't really help with code reviews. Then it becomes a Metcalfian paradox unless you just rubberstamp PRs, which is what is expected of you.

	▲	vanuatu an hour ago \| parent [-]
		its pretty easy to point your terminal agent to your giant pr and ask it to break it up into small prs if youre being asked to rubberstamp prs thats a management skill issue

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trjordan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's worse than that. At least if I dumped 5k LoC on somebody in 2021, you knew I spent the time to write it, so it's "fair" to ask you to read it. But I didn't write it in 2026, so you shouldn't read it.

I think it's less about "break it down" and more about "let's communicate at the same altitude."

I wrote a (bait-titled) post about it: https://tern.sh/blog/stop-reading-prs/

	▲	fusslo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		113 files +22913 −2423 305 files +15075 −13110 153 files +21934 −8698 125 files +28120 −2398 43 files +11188 −63 118 files +21564 −647 These are the largest (6 of 35) in the past 30 days. added: 190079 removed: 39696 in the last 6 months from one person.

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darth_aardvark 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Breaking up a giant PR can be a tedious, time-consuming hassle, and in the past I could sympathize in practice if someone had a giant PR they didn't have time to decompose once they got it working.

But it's also the exact sort of thing that LLMs are literally perfect for in my experience so there's really no excuse anymore. I've never seen Claude fail to turn a 5k PR into a well-decomposed Graphite stack.

	▲	xmodem an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hell, I've hand-written a large PR as a single commit and then asked claude to break it down for me at least once. But I think the fact doing this task by hand is a tedious, time-consuming hassle is not because it inherently has to be but because the tooling for doing it has barely changed in the past 15 years.

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win311fwg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is not so much forgetting as much as it is acceptance that when welcoming AI into a codebase, the code can no longer matter; that all that matters is that the properties of the system are validated. That isn't a change that comes free, so nobody should be expecting magic, it is a different set of tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a panacea.

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hootz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they expect you to also use an LLM to review, and I bet they are doing exactly that when asked to review someone else's code.

	▲	latentsea 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That gets you 90% the way there. So, it it only really works if you accept the cruft and the risks associated with that last 10%. Been doing this day in a day out for the last few months and no matter how much and how good we get the automated reviews, we still can't skip the manual ones.
	▲	acedTrex an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Theres really no diff between a rubber stamp and an llm review, they both do the same thing.

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cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks.

I would, and all my training at Google told me to do that. But what I found after I left that comfortable box was that somehow this kind of practice is acceptable in the industry at large and you're expected to just Deal With It(tm). 5k lines isn't even high by what I've seen.

Worse the "code review" tools that people have access to in GitHub make this absolutely and totally unworkable to incrementally improve review. Messy merge commits full of "responding to code review" comments. Threads impossible to follow. Just bad tooling.

So a lot of shops, from what I've seen, are just yeeting it with very shallow reviews.

This is my observation pre agentic AI. LLMs just threw kerosene on that dumpster fire.