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by yowlingcat 29 days ago
"Anyone who depends on code review to find bugs is living in a fool's paradise. As everyone should know by now, it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code."

I think this is pretty clumsily stated. The way I would best summarize what it should be is "The person best suited to address bugs in the code is the author/owner." That's usually some blend of detecting and fixing them. Code review can certainly surface bug-prone patterns being introduced (or extended), and even catch them directly.

But as many of the peer commenters state here, the depth of code review that finds buggy behavior and risky structuring is pretty involved and an expensive use of time. At most places I've reviewed code prior, this was always amortized as cost of doing business. Maybe partly because there wasn't a "theoretically" faster alternative, and maybe because we were trying to avoid 2 steps forward 1 step back.

Now, I think we are struggling with "the clinical trial problem" where there is more pressure to ship using AI but it doesn't actually abridge the QAing and review part. The problem with trying to abridge that part is it just creates backpressure like a spring and then catastrophically explodes 10x worse later on than if it was dealt with directly. It can be very easy to build a circle of pitfalls that were completely unnecessary. I think that automated code review techniques are going to have to evolve to keep up with the new paths that code can be generated through.

And to anyone that has to go through new, arms race enhanced forms of slop cannons -- my heart goes out to you, because the old ones were never particularly pleasant to deal with.