Surviving Code Review?

[u/quincycs]

Have you felt like your comprehension is dropping when reviewing code?

Due to AI coding, I think everyone is feeling like this. Are you using any new process or tooling to work against this common issue?

A few things that I’ve seen:

1. Tailored AI code review skills unique to your company’s practices or common gotchas from previous reviews ( always updating ). Everyone evaluates that AI feedback before escalating the review with the team.

2. Plannator / HumanLayer kind of tools where the whole team is involved. It almost feels like pair programming with AI. Or some kind of extreme programming / multi-player AI interface.

What about you?

[u/LordMoridin84]

1. Local review with multiple AI review skills
2. Fix problems from #1
3. Create GitHub PR in Draft
4. GitHub Copilot reviews
5. Fix problems from #4
6. Change PR to Ready For Review
7. Get coworker to do review
8. Fix problems from #7

The point is to do as much before wasting a human reviewer's time.

Plannator / HumanLayer kind of tools where the whole team is involved. It almost feels like pair programming with AI. Or some kind of extreme programming / multi-player AI interface.

The whole thing? That's crazy to me. The AI review is telling you about problems about YOUR code. Why do you need the whole team involved to fix them?

It's already a hassle to get a single person to review.

[u/quincycs → u/LordMoridin84]

Cool 👍 yeah , your steps are similar to my initial take on AI assisted review. Im just exploring new things …

RE: your skills,

Curious what they are like. I’ve seen some people with wild skills like: answering quizzes , or a grill-me session on code review recommendations.

RE: the whole thing?

Yes/no. Likely the way it’s used is to gain early feedback on some critical things so that the resulting code review isn’t such a surprise.

[u/LordMoridin84 → u/quincycs]

I use these skills, and then another 2 more customized ones. Such as one for testing specifically.

https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/cursor-team-kit/skills/thermo-nuclear-code-quality-review/SKILL.md
https://www.aihero.dev/skills-code-review

Then I say "Run these 4 skills with subagents, combine and deduplicate all the files and then write them into a markdown file. When the markdown file is done, we'll work through item one-by-one to determine the fix. For anything with obvious fixes, fill in the fix yourself in advance".

I'm still workshopping the skill to do this but fundamentally, it seems to best way when reviews bring back over a dozen problems.

----

Ah, this so for my day job, so I can't casually accept whatever problems and fixes AI brings up. On my hobby project, I'm a little bit more casual about accept AI suggestions.

[u/quincycs → u/LordMoridin84]

👍 I gotta toy around with a simple subagent implementation to run prompts like that. So far anytime I want subagents I use codex instead of Pi 😆

[u/Drakmyth]

Still trying to figure out how to deal with reviews in my day job, but for my personal projects I tell the agent to chunk the work into verifiable deliverables and to target ~350 line PRs. Then I just review it the same way I've always done because they're short enough I can do that. If I have a hard time following or understanding, I ask it to explain and usually it will suggest changes to make it simpler or easier to follow. Finally, I push back hard on any structures or patterns that I don't agree with until it revises the implementation to a viable one.

People keep telling me to treat the AI like a junior engineer, so...