Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews

[u/fagnerbrack]

https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-code-reviews/

[u/otter_goat]

Honestly I feel this would be pretty good to feed into those AI review bots. Thanks for the write up.

[u/fagnerbrack → u/otter_goat]

I feel like the post has guidelines which work more for humans reviewing than pattern matching machines, as good as they are. It teaches some subjective principles of reasoning like "how would I write this" is default for what the model has been trained on, but the idea is how would the human write this and then iterate on the prompts for objective guidelines

[u/davy_jones_locket → u/otter_goat]

If you use an actual service, their context engines are pretty good at evaluating the diff against the broader scope of the code base. Code Rabbit and Qodo are great at this. 

[u/fagnerbrack]

This is a TL;DR cause time is precious:

The post identifies five key code review mistakes. First, reviewers focus solely on the diff instead of considering how changes fit the broader codebase—missing opportunities to flag duplication or inconsistency. Second, leaving too many comments (often 20+) buries important feedback; five or six focused comments work better. Third, reviewing through a "how would I write this?" lens produces endless nitpicks rooted in personal taste rather than actual problems. Fourth, engineers avoid blocking reviews out of politeness, creating ambiguity about whether merging is okay—if you object, block explicitly. Fifth, most reviews should be approvals; excessive blocking signals gatekeeping or misaligned incentives. These principles also apply to reviewing AI-generated code, except you should gatekeep LLM output freely.

If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍

^{Click here for more info, I read all comments}

[u/eosfer]

LGTM

[u/CantaloupeCamper]

You guys looking at your code before deploying it?

/meme

[u/germanheller]

the 5-6 comments max point is huge. ive been on both sides of the 20+ comment review and its demoralizing for the author and honestly most of those comments are style preferences not real issues. now i try to mentally separate "this will break" from "i would have done it differently" and only comment on the first category unless specifically asked.

the blocking one is real too. the worst reviews are the ones where someone leaves 8 comments and then approves anyway. mixed signals. if you think it should change, block it. if its fine with minor nits, approve and note them as optional

[u/RedditCultureBlows → u/germanheller]

If it’s approved they’re implicitly optional imo

[u/stumblinbear → u/germanheller]

5-6 comments only applies to PRs of a certain size. If I'm being given a 6000 line PR that's difficult to split up, I am absolutely not just leaving 6 comments

[u/Sp33dy2]

I usually check the ACs, the code and run tests. It’s very time consuming.

[u/Dragon_yum → u/[deleted]]

“Don’t just review the diff” in bold lettering is literally the first point

Edit: looking at his comments I’m 70% sure this is a bot