Code Review When Half the Diffs Are From Agents
The article discusses the challenges of code review in the context of agent-authored code. It highlights the need for a shift in review practices as agents produce code faster than humans can read. The author emphasizes the importance of focusing on the overall shape of changes rather than line-by-line reviews in many cases.
- ▪Code review was originally designed for human authorship, where both writing and reviewing occurred at a similar pace.
- ▪With the introduction of agents, the speed of code production has outpaced the ability of reviewers to keep up, leading to potential bottlenecks or rubber-stamping of reviews.
- ▪The review process must adapt to focus on higher-level questions about the changes made, rather than scrutinizing every line of code.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 171498) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Ian Johnson Posted on May 29 Code Review When Half the Diffs Are From Agents #codereview #agents #ai #webdev Code review was invented for a world in which a human wrote each diff, slowly, and another human read it, also slowly. The ratio held. Reviewers could plausibly read every line of every change without becoming the bottleneck. The practice scaled because both sides scaled at roughly the same rate. Agents break the ratio. The author writes faster than the reviewer can read.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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