With not much more effort you can get a much better review by additionally concatenating the touched files and sending them as context along with the diff. It was the work of about five minutes to make the scaffolding of a very basic bot that does this, and then somewhat more time iterating on the prompt. By the way, I find it's seriously worth sucking up the extra ~four minutes of delay and going up to GPT-5 high rather than using a dumber model; I suspect xhigh is worth the ~5x additional bump in runtime on top of high, but at that point you have to start rearchitecting your workflows around it and I haven't solved that problem yet.
(That's if you don't want to go full Codex and have an agent play around with the PR. Personally I find that GPT-5.2 xhigh is incredibly good at analysing diffs-plus-context without tools.)
verdverm•11m ago
I've been using gemini-3-flash the last few days and it is quite good, I'm not sure you need the biggest models anymore. I have only switched to pro once or twice the last few days
Depends what you mean by "need", of course, but in my experience the curves aren't bending yet; better model still means better-quality review (although GPT-5.0 high was still a reasonably competent reviewer)!
ocharles•35m ago
I recently started using LLMs to review my code before asking for a more formal review from colleagues. It's actually been surprisingly useful - why waste my colleagues time with small obvious things? But it's also gone much further than that sometimes with deeper reviews points. Even when I don't agree with them it's great having that little bit more food for thought - if anything it helps seed the review
danlamanna•27m ago
Are you using a particularly well crafted prompt or just something off the cuff?
sultson•13m ago
This one's served fairly well:
"Review this diff - detect top 10 problem-causers, highlight 3 worst - I'm talking bugs with editing,saving etc. (not type errors or other minor aspects) [your diff]". The bit on "editing, saving" would vary based on goal of diff.
morkalork•12m ago
Not who you're replying to but working at a small small company, I didn't have anyone to give my code for review to so have used AI to fill in that gap. I usually go with a specific then general pass, where for example if I'm making heavy use of async logic, I'll ask the LLM to pay particular attention to pitfalls that can arise with it.
ocharles•3m ago
We're a Haskell shop, so I usually just say "review the current commit. You're an experienced Haskell programmer and you value readable and obvious code" (because that it is indeed what we value on the team). I'll often ask it to explicitly consider testing, too
Smaug123•40m ago
(That's if you don't want to go full Codex and have an agent play around with the PR. Personally I find that GPT-5.2 xhigh is incredibly good at analysing diffs-plus-context without tools.)
verdverm•11m ago
Here are the commits, the tasks were not trivial
https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/commits/_next/
Social posts and pretty pictures as I work on my custom copilot replacement
https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com
Smaug123•5m ago