I Can’t Get a Code Review
Photo by Volodymyr Dobrovolskyy on Unsplash
My recent record is four days. I spent four days waiting for a code review, which doesn’t sound too bad overall does it? The thing is the code (minus tests) only contained five lines of changes. Five lines, four days. Things never used to be this hard.
At the same time I “wrote” a 200 line change with AI, and another developer waived through the review in 10 minutes (with AI review, right). So…it’s hard and easy?
We are the Machines
For years we’ve treated software development as though the programmer was the bottleneck. We needed to get better developers, we needed to get better to ship faster in order to win.
Some employers even went so far as to train their developers and send them to conferences (although I’ve never seen smoothing like that). Once I got a new machine when my Mac was too slow (can you imagine?).
So when LLMs came along access to training (for me at least) dried up. At the same time companies converted us into the bottleneck, they have converted us into the machine.
Let me explain.
Creativity
Creativity has gone from software development, replaced by AI. Yet software developers seem to be working harder than ever, they are working long hours and late nights. Because we need to drive the machines, and the machines are waiting (waiting) for the bottlenecks to clear … which are us.
So rather than coding taking up the day…waiting is.
Waiting for a product manager to clarify a requirement.
Waiting for a designer to answer a question.
Waiting for QA.
Waiting for infrastructure.
Waiting for approvals.
And, most of all…
Waiting for code review. We are throughput machines, Instead of spending eight hours solving an interesting problem, you’re spending eight hours moving work through queues. That’s no fun. Work has become no fun at all.
Managers buy AI because they want developers to move faster. Developers do move faster. The rest of the organization doesn’t. Developers get miserable, and leave (to become solo coders, which is something I’ve seen with our stronger developers at work).
The PR Review?
AI has changed the size of pull requests. Changed the expectation for those important code reviews (particularly if they have been generated with no one really looking at the code).
People are handwaving code though. Each refactor makes things more confusing.
But, hey, each PR increments the count.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com
The Secret Developer opened a PR merged it, then reverted it. Then reintroduced the “good” version, and got 3 PRs out of it.