Code Review

What review is actually for once tooling handles formatting, what a useful checklist asks, and why review size predicts defect detection better than reviewer skill.

What Code Review Is For

Correctness, design, maintainability, security and knowledge sharing — five things a person can do. Formatting is not one of them, because a tool already did it.

Q · Once formatters, linters and tests have settled the mechanical questions, what is a human reviewer actually being asked to do?
A Review Checklist Worth Reading

Six questions, in the order attention runs out: behaviour against requirement, invariants moved, failure modes added, simpler alternative, meaningful tests, and whether you could debug it at three in the morning.

Q · What should a reviewer actually ask, and in what order, so the expensive questions get asked before attention runs out?
Review Size

The same reviewer finds real problems in a sixty-line change and waves through a nine-hundred-line one. Diff size predicts what review catches better than almost anything else about the reviewer.

Q · Why does the same person review a small change carefully and a large change not at all — and what do you do when the change genuinely is large?
Tone, Disagreement and Receiving Review

Critique the code and what it will cost, never the person. Then the two harder halves: disagreeing with someone senior, and taking twenty comments on work you were proud of.

Q · How do I say a design is wrong without the author hearing that they are wrong — and what do I do when the person I disagree with outranks me?
What to Automate Out of Review

Formatters, linters, type checkers, tests and static analysis exist so that human attention is spent only on what is arguable. Every mechanical comment a person still makes is a missing rule.

Q · Which review comments should never have to be made by a person again — and which ones look automatable but are not?
Review as Design Feedback — and Why It Arrives Too Late

By the time a change reaches review the boundary already exists. That is why "this belongs somewhere else" is the comment most often agreed with and least often acted on.

Q · Why does a code review almost never move a boundary, even when the reviewer is right and the author agrees?