So in that extra time, you can now stack more PRs that still have a 30 hour review time and have more overall throughput (good lord, we better get used to doing more code review)
This doesn’t work if you spend 3 minutes prompting and 27 minutes cleaning up code that would have taken 30 minutes to write anyway, as the article details, but that’s a different failure case imo
Generally if your job is acting as an expensive frontend for senior engineers to interact with claude code, well, speaking as a senior engineer I'd rather just use claude code directly.
We can use AI these days to add another layer.
If I can approve something without review, it’s instant. If it requires only immediate manager, it takes a day. Second level takes at least ten days. Third level trivially takes at least a quarter (at least two if approaching the end of the fiscal year). And the largest proposals I’ve pushed through at large companies, going up through the CEO, take over a year.
You don't need so much code or maintenance work if you get better requirements upfront. I'd much rather implement things at the last minute knowing what I'm doing than cave in to the usual incompetent middle manager demands of "starting now to show progress". There's your actual problem.
In software it's the opposite, in my experience.
> You don't need so much code or maintenance work if you get better requirements upfront.
Sure, and if you could wave a magic wand and get rid of all your bugs that would cut down on maintenance work too. But in the real world, with the requirements we get, what do we do?
You expect your calculator to always give correct answers, your bank to always transfer your money correctly, and so on.
I agree with him anyway: if every dev felt comfortable hitting a stop button to fix a bug then reviewing might not be needed.
The reality is that any individual dev will get dinged for not meeting a release objective.
So we will need to extract the decision making responsibility from people management and let the Decision maker be exclusively focused on reviewing inputs, approving or rejecting. Under an SLA.
My hypothesis is that the future of work in tech will be a series of these input/output queue reviewers. It's going to be really boring I think. Probably like how it's boring being a factory robot monitor.
Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team what you're going to build. The remain 10% of things like var naming, whitespace, and patterns can be checked with a linter instead of a person. If you can get the team to that level you can stop doing code reviews.
You also need to build a team that you can trust to write the code you agreed you'd write, but if your reviews are there to check someone has done their job well enough then you have bigger problems.
tptacek•54m ago
abtinf•49m ago
paulmooreparks•46m ago
nixon_why69•48m ago
lelanthran•46m ago
Most devs set aside some time at most twice a day for PRs. That's 5 hours at least.
Some PRs come in at the end of the day and will only get looked at the next day. That's more than 5 hours.
IME it's rare to see a PR get reviewed in under 5 hours.
Aurornis•45m ago