For work I often have to review multi thousand file changes in PR mostly generated by AI/Llama/claude code. It's mainly rust with many unit tests, so there is a lot tooling helps verify the code already to help a lot. But I struggle with these reviews, finding me to just glance over at times unable to comprehend the changes in any higher level capacity (e.g. architecture). Which I think is...
I sign off the code I merged, part of company policy but also just to be sure it is actually decent. But reviewing has become the real draining bottleneck: even stacked PRs, if that total 5-6k lines is not a 5min job. Even if I brainstormed and set the plan, that's really the part that doesn't scale right now for me in this. But the author is very shy about that: either the changes arent that big in the end or they trust the process enough to review in a more casual manner. Being equally untrusting I can't do that ...
Like the "white text between the lines that only appears when copy-pasted"-hack that some professors have been doing in their exercises to their students to include pink elephants in the output and stuff. But worse. Just thinking of a electricity bill pdf you provide as proof of address to some company that uses an LLM to extraxt that address and pre-process that doc. But instead we can command it to do something else that a regular human wouldn't even ever notice...
Just a thought
There has also been a lot of discussion about the value of the peer review process recently, in in general. But I wonder if this isn't all going into the wrong direction. Quite honestly, even with the previous review and discussion system of (squashed) commits how often did you really use git blame and opened up the original PR discussion of that changed line that caused the bug? And how often did it help you beyond learning it was done by that rockstar developer who has left long ago? And that the discussion on that PR was a point in time and the code around it has evolves beyond that and it would need looking at another 10 PR discussion to get the entire context.
What I am saying is that git (and before that Subversion and CVS) has a full history is so that it can resolve the latest state. Period. We made that commit ritual somewhat of a hallmark in putting more supposed meaning into recording ever more in that history. But we rarely stopped to check if that is all that useful. Recording even more, all the time, reminds me of these work group meetings that have minute records of every bike shedding meeting word said by everyone, that, honestly, no one ever looks at after the next meeting ever again. I don't think there is value in minute record keeping, it becomes too much noise that just makes it harder to parse. Now also adding all AI conversation and agent thinking to that tree? What's the value of that in like 3 months down the line? I don't see it.