I don't get all the people who complain about reviewing PRs. To me being a critic is much less stressful than being the author. Perhaps so much so that it becomes borderline enjoyable.

35 PRs on my client's codebase would be no big deal because I took a lot of time to understand the fundamentals of the business around it. I can recognize within seconds if a PR is an easy merge or a 5 minute phone call.

If you are struggling with PR reviews, this is a sign that something is wrong with the coal mine, not with your birds.

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ludwik 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I can recognize within seconds if a PR is an easy merge or a 5 minute phone call

I could, before LLM-authored PRs. They broke all my heuristics for what to check. LLMs can write code that looks incredibly professional and well thought out, and nowadays they almost never make the usual human mistakes (like off-by-one errors). But at the same time, they can make incredibly silly mistakes of the kind people would never make (like inventing brand-new parameters for some remote API call).

It feels like everything I’ve learned over the years about reviewing code no longer applies.

	▲	ctkhn 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One thing that's interesting is code review is still very static in my experience across gitub, gitlab, and bitbucket. Moving from a text editor to an IDE with LSP made a big difference for coding for me with click-through links and autocomplete of valid functions and variables. Raw text diff for review feels very old in comparison, especially as PRs generated by LLM agents get bigger and bigger compared to human PRs of the past.
	▲	krainboltgreene 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I watched someone vibe code with a top of the line model, something they did quite regularly, and it was the most insane mess of code I have ever seen.

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thebrain 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to be able to say the same but 10k loc diffs at my org shattered this ability pretty quickly.

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xyzsparetimexyz 2 days ago | parent [-]

auto reject, ask to split it up and minimize the diff.

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OrangeDelonge 2 days ago | parent [-]

Then you get 10 1k PR’s

	▲	fwlr a day ago \| parent [-]
		Or fired

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ncruces 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I can recognize within seconds if a PR is an easy merge or a 5 minute phone call.

I'm glad you can.

Even before agents, I'm pulled to work on at least a couple different projects a year, the successful ones with teams of 10s of people working on them. If I stay longer than a couple of months, I eventually become the expert on some of the things I did, so I get pulled years later to review something I haven't touched in ages, which has changed requirements, and grown a bunch of dependents.

That was the reality of working on a team with hundreds of people and dozens of related products.

Now agents are helping people increase complexity and velocity N-fold.

You can call it a problem in the coal mine, but there's no going back. GitHub simply has no choice but to handle this new scale.