u/Both-Algae-5494

Disclaimer: I'm not anti-AI and I'd like to hear from people who are finding success with code reviews. Ideally, I'd like to have a discussion that's a bit more involved than just "AI bad lol".

So I've been giving AI code reviews a shot for the past couple weeks to try to help with the code-review bottleneck that we, like many other teams, are facing due to individual contributors being able to generate code much faster than before. However, I don't get how they are useful. Here's a typical workflow I've experienced :

1. Junior sends in a PR, it's obviously mostly AI generated code. Such is life these days.

2. I ask them if they asked for reviews to their AI agent of choice before sending it my way. Their answer: yes, three times.

3. ok fine, I give it a shot. I also ask for a review from an AI agent, with the supposed added value that, since I have more experience, I'll be able to judge the quality of that review better. I'm not sure I agree with this assumption I've been hearing, but let's just assume this is how it works.

4. The AI review comes out with 4 comments, 2 of them i find neat and the other 2 a bit nitpicky. Fine, but im curious... what if I implement these changes locally, and ask another agent to review this new code version in the context of the PR?

5. New agent finds 5 new "issues" to correct. Wtf? Ok now im curious, so I start looping for 5-6 iterations just to see where this goes. Every single time, it digs deeper to find something to complain about. Turns out the AI reviews can be chained pretty much infinitely and a new model or agent will always find something to "improve" on the PR and find a reason to not accept the merge... at least in my limited experience with them.

Am I missing something? People have been praising code reviews as an "actual good usecase" for AI, but I don't see it. In my experience, the agents just find too many ways to simply chain-critique the code. The agent's job is essentially to find holes in the PR, and it will dig relentlessly until it finds something to complain about. I have not seen a single "yep, that PR looks 10/10 now" from any agent in the 2 weeks I tried them.

Disclaimer: I'm not anti-AI and I'd like to hear from people who are finding success with code reviews. Ideally, I'd like to have a discussion that's a bit more involved than just "AI bad lol".

So I've been giving AI code reviews a shot for the past couple weeks to try to help with the code-review bottleneck that we, like many other teams, are facing due to individual contributors being able to generate code much faster than before. However, I don't get how they are useful. Here's a typical workflow I've experienced :

1. Junior sends in a PR, it's obviously mostly AI generated code. Such is life these days.

2. I ask them if they asked for reviews to their AI agent of choice before sending it my way. Their answer: yes, three times.

3. ok fine, I give it a shot. I also ask for a review from an AI agent, with the supposed added value that, since I have more experience, I'll be able to judge the quality of that review better. I'm not sure I agree with this assumption I've been hearing, but let's just assume this is how it works.

4. The AI review comes out with 4 comments, 2 of them i find neat and the other 2 a bit nitpicky. Fine, but im curious... what if I implement these changes locally, and ask another agent to review this new code version in the context of the PR?

5. New agent finds 5 new "issues" to correct. Wtf? Ok now im curious, so I start looping for 5-6 iterations just to see where this goes. Every single time, it digs deeper to find something to complain about. Turns out the AI reviews can be chained pretty much infinitely and a new model or agent will always find something to "improve" on the PR and find a reason to not accept the merge... at least in my limited experience with them.

Am I missing something? People have been praising code reviews as an "actual good usecase" for AI, but I don't see it. In my experience, the agents just find too many ways to simply chain-critique the code. The agent's job is essentially to find holes in the PR, and it will dig relentlessly until it finds something to complain about. I have not seen a single "yep, that PR looks 10/10 now" from any agent in the 2 weeks I tried them.