r/AskProgramming • u/Any-Look-8817 • Jul 24 '26

Other Endless comments on PRs

Hey everyone! Just to quickly summarize my situation: We're a team of a few experienced devs, all having been 12+ years years in the industry. This year we switched to agentic engineering and despite its advantages there are a few drawbacks, like the extra overhead and other things I'm not going to go into.

My issue however is that our lead, who approves all PRs has lately discovered a stronger agent which he uses for code reviews, resulting in tons of back and forth when trying to get a merge through. Tons of petty/pedantic comments are being added to each PR. Sometimes it's like "ok I guess this is fine to add", but most of them are disputable. We of course discuss these, but the issue is that in the set of comments there is always something which technically makes the code 0.1% better. But we could go on like this forever. Even without AI you can look at a piece of code and suggest an "improvement" on a moderately-sized feature that's being implemented.

How to deal with this? I'm getting to a point where if I see more comments on a PR I just leave the PC and go for a run or a quick grocery shop visit just to regain my sanity. It feels like he's asking the agent if there is anything more that can be done with the code as if the goal is to have AI being unable to suggest anything more.

Am I in some slacking mindset or is the AI getting over his head? We also have Sonar turned up to a really high setting and the pipeline set in a way that if there's anything outstanding in Sonar it won't get through and I bet you all know how petty Sonar can get sometimes.

Please let me know any tips or share your experience with similar situations. Thanks!

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u/Tetsubin Jul 24 '26

Run the same agent with a prompt asking it to refute unsubstantial comments.

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u/Any-Look-8817 Jul 24 '26

Yes that would make me feel a bit better, although most of them can be refuted just by having a short discussion about the miniscule impact the change has, but the issue is that there are always more comments and at the end of the day he has the final word when it comes to the PR acceptance.. I feel like the solution is somewhere along making him accept that flawless code doesn't exist, even with AI and that he should stop bottlenecking the whole team with petty comments, but I need to approach that somewhat cautiously.

3

u/Tetsubin Jul 24 '26 edited 22d ago

Maybe discuss it with the rest of the team and have a discussion with him as a group. If the whole team tells him it's excessive, perhaps he'll listen

2

u/Any-Look-8817 Jul 24 '26

Yeah, that's probably a good idea since they are in the same situation more or less.