When It's OK Not to Understand Your Own PR

Re:When It's OK Not to Understand Your Own PR by latexr on Saturday September 26, 2026 @04:30PM (#49860257)

> Second, while the author may not understand the code at a level where they could have written it themselves, they should still understand it as a reviewer. Treat it like the agent is the author and the human author is the first reviewer; don't pull somebody else in until you're satisfied first.

Emphasis mine.

That brings you back to square one. You should only be satisfied with the state of the PR once you understand it. Anything below that and you’re not doing your job properly. That doesn’t mean the code needs to be flawless on first PR, but you should understand everything it is doing and the why of the approach, otherwise there’s no point to you doing it.

So to the question in the title, the answer is quite simply “never”.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When It's OK Not to Understand Your Own PR by wakamoleguy on Saturday September 26, 2026 @05:26PM (#49860699)

This leans heavily on what "doing your job properly" means. Code quality, understanding, and doing your job properly are not so black-and-white. Your job is probably not to push out flawless code; it's more likely to push out valuable code, that minimizes risk, and appropriately trades off speed and quality (for some appropriate definition of "appropriate").

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When It's OK Not to Understand Your Own PR by latexr on Saturday September 26, 2026 @07:00PM (#49861409)

> it's more likely to push out valuable code, that minimizes risk, and appropriately trades off speed and quality

And you can only ascertain you have done so if you can understand what you pushed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When It's OK Not to Understand Your Own PR by wakamoleguy on Saturday September 26, 2026 @07:31PM (#49861638)

Maybe we’re in violent agreement? In the example of a staging database config, I understand the problem that CI faced, the fix in the PR, and a rough upper limit on the tech debt impact of the connection strings diverging. I have an assumption (not an understanding) about how long it might take to learn about PgBouncer in Neon, and the worst case if it is wrong (CI breaks). Does that qualify as understanding the PR? I couldn’t have authored it by myself with this understanding, because to do so would require me to have learned about PgBouncer to find the fix.

[ Parent | on HN ]