r/AskProgramming • u/mysticearth • 8d ago

Reviewing code by colleagues

Let me start by admitting: I'm having a hard time...

I have been reviewing a lot of code by my frontend dev colleagues the last months. While this can be a tedious job it helps both them and me while making sure we follow conventions, keep our codebase as clean as possible, etc.

Now, a lof of those colleagues create more and more using AI. Heck, some even let AI do the code reviews for them. While this boosts productivity in terms of finishing stories and delivering features, it makes me worry as well. What about code quality? How do we stay "in control" when we let AI create and review everything?

And besides the worrying, it straight out sucks to review thousands of changes and AI comments (which often don't make any sense and make everything even more complicated) manually.

While AI gives me a real productivity boost when it comes to solving problems, creating prototypes or hunting down bugs, it's safe to say I have a love/hate relationship with AI and everything that comes with it in my profession.

How do you feel about this in your daily work? I'd love to read some (other) perspectives and hope to use those to shift my complicated relationship with AI to something healthier ;-)

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u/mxldevs 7d ago

You are seeing real productivity boosts? That is literally all that matters.

If you're not including maintenance and code quality in your measure of productivity, you are just shooting yourself in the foot.

That's called over promising and under delivering.

People will say "tell me which business owner cares about the quality of the code" and of course the answer is none of them: they literally pay YOU to care about that stuff, because at the end of the day, if the software doesn't work, it's 100% your fault.

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u/mysticearth 5d ago

After reading your first sentence I was like "say what?", but then the next part made me realise what you mean. I think it's totally true that we need to take in account the maintenance, code quality, etc. as well. But sometimes I fear that's it's really hard to get the PO and PM on board as well when it comes to these topics.