LLM's are good at some types of reviews and awful at others. They generally tend to overcomplicate things and miss opportunities to simplify. They pretty much have to take pre-existing code and tests as gospel and cannot distinguish which is buggy, incomplete, unimportant or important. They have no knowledge of unwritten business requirements, customer preferences, et cetera so high level review is always necessary.
Yeah ok but that’s what I have. I have the knowledge of unwritten business requirements and customer preferences.
My knowledge + Claude is much better than just my knowledge.
I don’t know why it is considered strange to use both tools (my knowledge plus Claude) to make reviews go quicker. In fact it is highly dogmatic to not use Claude while reviewing.
I also like having long, pointed conversations with LLMs as I review code. Then when I'm done, it's different code, and it has all of my blind spots and knowledge gaps, so I cannot effectively review it anymore.
It's like turning a code review that requests you, into a code review that requests someone else. And it tramples on the original author quite a bit too. It's hard only having the ability to add incremental value to large amounts of code, instead of large amounts of value to incremental code.