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Is the purpose of these tools really to spend less time? I think their main value is reducing mistakes through having one extra set of eyes, even if mechanical
by lukaslalinsky 2y ago
Is the purpose of these tools really to spend less time? I think their main value is reducing mistakes through having one extra set of eyes, even if mechanical ones, looking at the code.
As a sole developer of a non-trivial open source project, I've recently started using CodeRabbit, very skeptical about it, but right on the first PR, it actually found a bug that my CI tests did not catch, decided to keep it after that.
Gemini Code Assist on the other hand, the first suggestion it did would actually lead to a bug, so that was out immediately.
- layer8 2y agoThese code review tools are basically analogous in function to a linter. They flag potential issues, but you still have to check all of them.
- avikalp 2y agoWhat you are saying is true, and this is the feedback I hear every time I talk to a small team of developers (generally fewer than 15 developers). At this stage, you don't need "another set of eyes" because it is not that big of a problem to break something, as you are not going to lose massive amounts of money because of the mistake. All these teams need is a sanity check. They also generally (even without the AI code reviewers) do not have a strong code review process. This is why, in the article, I have clearly mentioned that these are learning based on talking to engineers in Series-B and Series-C startups.