[makeitdouble]

> call or something.

I kinda hate this.

It will feel efficient for the two people involved, but I'd actually want that exchange to be public and in writing, as we're talking about code that will go to production and will be read, debugged and maintained by dozen of other people from there.

Especially if it was complex enough to be discussed to these lengths. I don't care about code comments and don't trust people to properly maintain them, as long as MRs have the original context and discussion of the decisions. Shorting these discussions is a net loss to the org IMHO.

[watwut]

No one will read that discussion, ever. And it is such an epic waste of time to write down all these nitpicky discussions.

And a call where we react to each other takes 3 minutes max while the exchange through comments can take a week. Or, 2 days but both of you need to interrupt what you are doing a lot to answer quickly.

It is just absurd to treat code review as a discussion forum.

[makeitdouble]

I spend half of my life on a legacy codebase, and the past PRs are my go to to understand anything mildly tricky in there.

My biggest realization was that the code comments were meaningless and borderline deceptive compared to the actual discussions and the target specs in the MRs. There's such a gap between what people want to explain or think will be useful, and the info actually needed. And I don't blame them, I'm not sure I'd do better.

My favorite is threads like "This name makes no sense" -> "Sure, give me a better name for X doing Y to Z" -> "Nevermind", which completely explains some of the insane naming, what they actually meant by it, and would never be left in any half official documentation.

[1718627440]

I generally agree with you, but this:

"This name makes no sense" -> "Sure, give me a better name for X doing Y to Z" -> "Nevermind"

Should really result in a comment "/* X doing Y to Z */" before the declaration. I try to address these issues by treating PRs the same as phone calls, they can be gone tomorrow, so I put all the things in the code or the commit message. But of course I am not perfect, the people after me will determine whether I was successful.

[1718627440]

You can get the best of both worlds by doing a phone call and then writing your insights in the commit message.