Developers Face Slow Code Review Approval
20 posts across 8 communities in the last 30 days; 55% from r/cscareerquestions.
“I wish this was the case. The reality is these absurd changes always come from higher up. Devs use the product more than ANYONE else and know better than anyone when something is a bad change, but project managers don’t care and force bad decisions through the process to be able…”
“I really hate how software engineering is now boiled down to just “who can type the best prompt into Claude”. I miss the days when we actually thought about code and how to write it well.”
“The industry wide disaster will be maintaining and replacing all the crappy code. Creation of new features is not the expensive part of software. The expensive part is maintaining and replacing legacy systems. Or when they break. Just throwing out more and more features faster…”
Software developers are experiencing delays in getting their pull requests approved, leading to frustration and a feeling that the process is inefficient.
SOURCES (60)
“I work in healthcare on critical software. Damn right we are doing full human review. For us, shipping a bug doesn't mean a little button is the wrong color it means some one may get hurt. [re: My feedback on 6 months full AI development]”
“Some people need to see this. Look, I'm all for improvement. But the age of not reviewing PRs is hot garbage. Automated code generation is fine. But yoloing code you've never seen is never going to be a practice I accept. If reviewing PRs is too much work for someone, then this work isn't for them. If someone is pressuring you to ignore review, stop listening to them or respecting their opinions - they're a liability, even if they're your manager, product owner, business owne”
“I agree with you. All these productivity statements are more likely coming from mediocre developers. I don't say that's bad to be a meh dev, I also don't want to offend anyone. I may be part of this group. LLMs are just tools. A great developer with a tool is still a great developer. A mediocre developer will stay mediocre regardless the tools. That's just a reliaziation check everybody should make. [re: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engine”
“Very easy to say that when you have minimal information and just want to be a dick behind a keyboard rather than supportive. I've done my job and many more successfully.”
“Developers take immens pride in their work and they feel ownership. If you want to improve someone's else solutions, talk to them before you start. I assume this specific case could be nothing with just asking "I have nothing to to do this weekend, would it be ok if I tried to improve the performance in Xyz for you?"”
“I wish this was the case. The reality is these absurd changes always come from higher up. Devs use the product more than ANYONE else and know better than anyone when something is a bad change, but project managers don’t care and force bad decisions through the process to be able to say “look at all the progress we made””
“i'm not finding that argument to be super compelling today. ai error rate is decreasing, human review is less useful over time. and the pile of code is increasing over time. the human code review bottleneck is getting worse and the value is rapidly decreasing. the right answer is to rethink what's necessary at every step to ensure proper check and balance to maximize llm throughput without sacrifice quality.”
“I really hate how software engineering is now boiled down to just “who can type the best prompt into Claude”. I miss the days when we actually thought about code and how to write it well.”
“Show me any line of Bash that actively makes a company money that customers pay for. It’s just expensive dev tooling and wastes a bunch of time getting to market. Honestly Bash is the first thing that should be completely replaced with AI.”
“Usually all you get are creds to the development environment. Anything higher and you aren't allowed to see them. If you do have to go into production then a SRE/support has to act as your hands and feet. At one company they went to such an extreme that they had a whole automated system for granting temp credentials. You would put in a change order and those credentials would only be valid for that window. Even under that situation it was still an SRE/support doing the actual commands. Only”
“Lol neither do you. And if you think that the companies literally dumping billions into developing these tools is going to automate engineering before marketing or devops then I have a bridge to sell you.”
“Yeah probably, most jobs in tech are not about being a good programmer, they are about familiarity with the many, many layers of abstraction in web dev.”
“The industry wide disaster will be maintaining and replacing all the crappy code. Creation of new features is not the expensive part of software. The expensive part is maintaining and replacing legacy systems. Or when they break. Just throwing out more and more features faster with lower quality will cumulate in a nightmare 10 years down the road. Of course, if you are working for a startup that will go out of business anyway, this doesn't matter. But most software is built in enterprises fo”
“I run a busy dev team and am a dev myself. We're a small company but work for huge, very demanding clients who also, for a variety of reasons, often put us in the worst possible position to ensure quality: unreasonable deadlines, last minute requirement changes, not doing their side of technical things properly, etc. Needless to say, seldom does a month go by without someone fucking something up. Sometimes those fuckups are very severe in terms of the client's business, compliance or inf”
“That is a good point. Jensen Huang alluded to this. Regulatory capture is in full effect.”
“I mean plus OP is not senior so were there no reviews and like you said to "lightly" QA a engine rewrite is not OPs fault. OP I've brought down accidentally of course a relatively well known service with a single pr that was reviewed twice and QAed. Post mortem revealed a bug I didn't create but triggered 😂”
“Ugh I hate them asking for github. Not everyone has time for open source projects. And in over 50 commercial projects not once have I done something major on a public repository.”
“Also, people act like devs don't make bugs or break things or write shitty code. It is pretty hard to hire good devs and keep them.”
“the idea that "oh we gave it access to the whole codebase and our notes" and expected it to do anything other than just write it exactly the way it would've written it without that information is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works. It's like saying "I assigned this p0 product build out to the intern and gave them full google docs and github access and they still messed it up, I can't believe it!"”
“I’m an engineer for 17 years and have been forced into product again because we needed someone who knew marketing and engineering. So I’m currently working with the real engineer crew of some of the smartest humans I’ve ever come across in tech. I’ve worked at acquisition companies and come across everything from startup guys, to agency, to FAANG devs. These guys are in fact the smartest because the product encompasses web, firmware, IoT, low level graphics, ai, hardware, and all sorts of stuff.”
“Code has issues? Check who committed the changes, ask them why they haven't reviewed the code properly. Go back to actually making the devs accountable for the code they commit. Doesn't matter if it's 2% or 90% AI-generated/reviewed. The dev is the one claiming to have reviewed it. Is it shit? Then it's shit they reviewed and approved. You keep committing shit? You get fired.”
“Most of the time I'm getting paid to take AI generated mess and completely redesign it and rewrite it. I have learned to refuse projects that require me to "fix this one little thing". If I see the project was vibe coded, I propose a complete rewrite 100% of the time. Fixing is not worth it.”
“That's exactly what I'm thinking about lately. If software becomes so cheap, the next thing is that software and processes will be created for almost any office jobs. It came for devs first, next it will come for any white collar job and we the devs might actually profit from that transition for a while.”
“the difference is getting people to, you know, actually do these things. It's nice in a book, but getting people to talk is like pulling explosive teeth.”
“Personally, having been subjected to it, I hate it. It's like trying to ride a bicycle down a road when people keep running out from the side and kicking you. You never know what you're going to be doing, or shoved into doing, on any given morning. At any moment, all your work for weeks or months could be tossed in the trash because someone's decided to go in a different direction. Agile, to me, has always come across as "We have no idea what we're doing or where we're g”
“The trend comes hand in hand with quality eroding across the board, and everyone hating everything they use. It's all just a matter of risk - those companies believe that customers have nowhere else to go. I foresee more and more giants falling. You're right, though. Dedicated QA is diminishing. It's just far from gone, and I don't believe that AI is expediting it all that much. The companies who see value in dedicated QA still do so, given the utilization of AI by effective test”
“Devs all test their own changes? The issue there is bias / blindness. I don't know anywhere that exists where if someone breaks something they don't have to fix it - the issue is primarily the risk associated with the breaks, and the potential for the break to lurk and do significant damage until it's mitigated, right? This model is utilized heavily, of course, where the product has more tolerance for risk, but damn is it bad practice to have everyone responsible for testing their ow”
“<disclaimer maybe some ppl find long post but just trying to understand pain is real or not …> I have been talking a lot lately from devs and eng managers: review queues are backed up, the diffs are huge, and nobody is confident the code is actually safe to ship. It makes sense. Agent-generated code moves fast. But the review process didn't evolve with it. You're still squinting at diffs, still relying on someone to mentally simulate what the agent did, and still hoping the happy p”
“The “review takes 3 minutes” part only works if automated checks catch most problems first. For me, linters, type checks, and tests run before anyone reviews the PR. Then code review is more about “does this change make sense here?” rather than “does this even work?” Same with AI review. Without good tests behind it, you’re just moving the trust problem somewhere else.”
“yeah the whole thing reads like someone got tired of getting feedback on their PRs tbh”
“If drvs are spending only a few minutes to review a PR then I can't imagine them spending too much time on testing or QA either”
“You dont say what you mean by properly but most devs I have worked with, and that amounts to like 600 simply dont know wtf a PR review is meant to be. Its not QA, and its certainly not writing the feature again, its a quick check of anything obvious. You request changes for mistakes that are critical, make comments for things that don't affect ability of the app to work, then approve the PR if overall it improves/advances the codebase. If your "review" takes more than a few mins yo”
“Shared this with a friend to vent and they thought Reddit might appreciate it. I don't usually commiserate about this topic on Reddit so apologies if this is the wrong sub... didn't quite feel like an r/excel post. The Teams message was meant to be a slightly humorous way to express my frustration/disappointment to colleagues outside the email thread with our boss about said data. Rant incoming. Could I have just thrown Python at this nonsense and built something much more elegant and ro”
“But languages have no concepts, concepts transcend languages, take rust borrow checker, that same concept can be applied in C, or take the event loop in javascript, it's a common programming pattern... Programming is about data transformation, languages are just the machine used to transform the data, yes, to code fast you need practice, but for high paying positions you don't hire a machine operator, you hire an engineer that knows the theory to make sound design and arch decisions and”
“Did you even read what the LLM spat out before copy-pasting a novel here? Fucking hate working with people who do this shit.”
“How the fuck do you explain the rising unemployment and all the mass firings? Sure, not ALL devs will get the boot, but a very large proportion will.”
“My eng manager is pushing for us to stop human reviews of code. Feels like an oncoming shit show, but it's impossible to push back on without getting a target on my head.”
“Yep frontend dev is basically dead unless data centers get hit by asteroids. Can't say I'll miss arguing about tailwind and react. There's so much elitism in this industry relating to frontend vs backend. But everyone has to be "full stack" these days so inevitably every frontend codebase gets wrecked by backend devs that don't give a shit about frontend code quality anyway. Not to mention - many applications have captive audiences who do not give a fuck if the UI and d”
“I've hit again a point where me as a developer have to take a break from all this slop shit. Im a Developer for 13+ years and i loved it. But i fell for the slop trap. First it started with copilot and to be honest, that was pretty fine. Just assisting with your code in a small scope. Get support for Debugging and finding bugs. Autocompletions hitting the nail pretty often and thinking "yea thats exactly what i was about to code." I kinda miss those early days. It was such a nice h”
“The thing people fail to realize before going into this field is that the overwhelming majority of developers are just doing boring work implementing boring features. You're probably not going to be applying a CS degree directly in most cases beyond being cognizant of what the computer and code are doing beyond your IDE or how things fit together. Very few of us actually get into the weeds of math, optimization, and computation unless you really need to get as much performance as you can”
“Nah that’s fair. By “what would YOU” do I meant people in general in this position. But yeah, I’m glad you have a back up. Not everyone is in a position to do that without absolutely losing livelihood for themselves or family.”
“1-2 stories in a sprint is definitely not standard. I check in on people if their story isn't making progress over the course of 2-3 days depending on what it is. I'm clearing more than that and my time is split between meetings, code reviews, mentoring, etc.”
“This is absolutely true.The vast majority of devs pre-ai clocked in, wrote mediocre or even bad code, and clocked out. Those same people at least have a coding buddy with a bar of quality set at least as high as what they'd normally write, and simple prompts of "any security considerations I'm missing?" can take it to the next level.If you work on a team of devs who truly care about code quality, you should thank the people in charge of hiring. Odds are they culled hundreds of mediocre applicant”
“I completely understand you. Before the team/company decides to go full AI on the codebase it needs to put the guardrails first. don't manually review sloppy PR's. create automatic code reviewer that detects slops. note that code reviewer needs to have access to your architecture/documentation and somebody needs to spend time on writing precies guidelines require extensive unit tests ensure people still take ownership of their code changes. if they fuck up, you're not responsible. yo”
“All of them. Developers write code. People who claim to write 0 lines of code are replaceable by a college grad who can prompt the same AI for a smaller salary. Their time is limited and we'll start to see mass layoffs in the coming years when executives learn their employees do fuck all but expect large salaries.”
“Think of A.I. as super-smart, but an idiot, all at the same time. Seriously, old ways of doing code reviews dont scale. Your eyes glaze over, you begin to yawn.. ---be creative in how to get A.I. to review the code. an antagonistic agent. ---breakdown into smaller tasks if possible (if you want to review). ---commit often.”
“Precisely, every software company needs to take a 1 year break on new features and focus on fixing bugs.”
“If they don't have capacity they don't have capacity. That's the problem you're meant to escalate to help fix mate. That's the point of your job.”
“Different angles. One is anal about testing and writing testable code, another consistency, architecture, idiomatic code and “the way we do things here” and last one actually is looking for bugs and mistakes”
“I think this is focused on not making something new, but fixing a problem or modifying an existing feature. It's good at the small stuff like that. After a root cause analysis, some people just have the AI fix it and put up a MR/PR. That was a whole lot of people's jobs just doing that.”
“I've literally never been at a place where non technical people do code reviews that sounds backwards as fuck, I'd get the fuck out sounds like a clown show”
“Yeah that’s how I’ve been working on my code review skill. I have a running REVIEW.md which has instructions and advice that gets modified and appended to every PR. As the weeks go on, it has reduced a lot of false positives and unrelated comments that the agent makes. Basically if the agent is exhibiting review behavior that I don’t like, I correct it and then tell it to look at the original comment and the correction and then tell it to take the conceptual diff and add it to the document”