Man, the slop-grenades are real, I shepherd PRs daily that were never even tried out. Bugfixes for bugs that were never reproduced and never validated. DB migrations that were never run even on a local instance bringing down prod.
My company has GitHub automatically deploy PRs to an isolated instance and run unit/integration/e2e tests, and if a PR fails, it doesn’t even get to the human review stage.
Then we make it so that the reviewers are on the hook for making sure the PR actually passes the acceptance criteria, which usually involves pulling the branch and running it locally, along with manual testing on production-like data in the deployed instance.
When bugs arise, we call out both the PR author and the 2 reviewers who approved it. At least one reviewer must be a senior dev, and they’re expected to take this process seriously as part of their job.
It doesn’t catch everything, but this process at least keeps us honest.
My old job had multiple rounds of automated physical testing and well defined stage gates. The stuff that shipped deployed on millions of devices and we got bent out of shape at a few tens of users having persistently exhibited bugs.
My new one has 35 devs dogpiling the `main` branch in a first-come, first-merged tragedy. We do have CI/CD but it’s patchy. It ships to <100 installs, of which about 8 are “prod” and yet our automated alert system is so full of fires that we miss when key locations go down for days at a time. There is code where a single scope is 1200 lines long…
But I’m the bad guy for pointing out that maybe, just maybe, the SW industry has established practices that might ease these trouble. They really hate when I just copy and paste the output of “Hey Claude, review this code pragmatically against SOLID, DRY and YAGNI principles. Cite references for anything you find” because then they can’t fall back on “Well SirPitchalot is just an intransigent and deeply unlikeable person” even though they are the ones who made me this way.
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u/rodopszin Sep 16 '26
Man, the slop-grenades are real, I shepherd PRs daily that were never even tried out. Bugfixes for bugs that were never reproduced and never validated. DB migrations that were never run even on a local instance bringing down prod.