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Yes. I sympathize with the “every PR needs human eyes on it” ethos but fundamentally the only thing that scales with AI PR generation is AI PR review.

nonethewiser 19d ago
If you are talking about AI's opening PR's then maybe you have a point. But a person opening a PR should not be met with unvetted feedback. To be absolutely clear, AI should be used for PR review. It should be used many times. By the PR author and by all the reviewers. It should not just be piped directly from the agent to the author inside the PR. That causes the author to triage every comment.
bigstrat2003 19d ago
That's probably true. And it is also a glaring red flag saying "STOP LETTING AN LLM GENERATE PRs". Far too few will heed that red flag, I fear.
epolanski 19d ago
I don't get the point of AI pr review. If the AI can review the pr, it can do so before the PR exists in the first place. It's a tool/skill/prompt. Just share it with the end user or encode it in the codebase in some files. It may actually be even more useful as that person will use it often and improve it or can it.
- sick_of_slop 19d ago
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- tharkun__ 19d ago
  That sounds good. But it doesn't work in practice from my experience. The exact same skill in the hands of one person will have vastly different outcomes in the hands of a different person. The review skill I built myself has been shared with folks. They (say they) use it before they put up a PR. I still catch things with the same skill. That is evolving as I catch the model(s) at BSing. Even if I would re-share it all the time, when I catch it, these other people using the same skill wouldn't catch it. And that is exactly why building a general purpose review agent (or skill) is harder than me having my own evolving skill. If I have to "properly" release a skill/some automation, I will likely err on the side of not having too many false positives. That is harder than still relying on a human to review the AI reviewer. The same people that were really good actual human reviewers of a PR are probably the ones that are good doing the same thing while AI assisted. And the ones that really needed these other human reviewers and processes to help them be productive are probably going to produce a vibe coded mess if left to their own devices with nothing but some AI.
  - rwiggins 19d ago
    Have you tried running the same review skill back to back in fresh sessions? My experience has been: 1) build complicated thing with LLM, 2) run code review, 3) it finds like 8 things, 4) fix them, 5) run another code review, 6) it finds another new 8 things, rinse and repeat. I'd guess people truly are finding things pre-review. It's just that LLM review seems to have a limit to the number of problems it can or will find. While at the same time, LLM-written code can be an almost limitless source of bugs and errors. It has no sense of when an architecture is doomed and needs fundamental changes. Instead, it will happily continue to chase individual bugs nearly to infinity. But, maybe your review skill is better than the ones I've tried.
- pdntspa 19d ago
  With the way memory systems work, I can see the value in having a different person's AI conduct the review as that AI's 'memory' is going to have a slightly different perspective aligned with the developer piloting it

nonethewiser 19d ago

If you are talking about AI's opening PR's then maybe you have a point. But a person opening a PR should not be met with unvetted feedback. To be absolutely clear, AI should be used for PR review. It should be used many times. By the PR author and by all the reviewers. It should not just be piped directly from the agent to the author inside the PR. That causes the author to triage every comment.

bigstrat2003 19d ago

That's probably true. And it is also a glaring red flag saying "STOP LETTING AN LLM GENERATE PRs". Far too few will heed that red flag, I fear.

epolanski 19d ago

I don't get the point of AI pr review. If the AI can review the pr, it can do so before the PR exists in the first place. It's a tool/skill/prompt. Just share it with the end user or encode it in the codebase in some files. It may actually be even more useful as that person will use it often and improve it or can it.

sick_of_slop 19d ago
[dead]
tharkun__ 19d ago
That sounds good. But it doesn't work in practice from my experience. The exact same skill in the hands of one person will have vastly different outcomes in the hands of a different person. The review skill I built myself has been shared with folks. They (say they) use it before they put up a PR. I still catch things with the same skill. That is evolving as I catch the model(s) at BSing. Even if I would re-share it all the time, when I catch it, these other people using the same skill wouldn't catch it. And that is exactly why building a general purpose review agent (or skill) is harder than me having my own evolving skill. If I have to "properly" release a skill/some automation, I will likely err on the side of not having too many false positives. That is harder than still relying on a human to review the AI reviewer. The same people that were really good actual human reviewers of a PR are probably the ones that are good doing the same thing while AI assisted. And the ones that really needed these other human reviewers and processes to help them be productive are probably going to produce a vibe coded mess if left to their own devices with nothing but some AI.
- rwiggins 19d ago
  Have you tried running the same review skill back to back in fresh sessions? My experience has been: 1) build complicated thing with LLM, 2) run code review, 3) it finds like 8 things, 4) fix them, 5) run another code review, 6) it finds another new 8 things, rinse and repeat. I'd guess people truly are finding things pre-review. It's just that LLM review seems to have a limit to the number of problems it can or will find. While at the same time, LLM-written code can be an almost limitless source of bugs and errors. It has no sense of when an architecture is doomed and needs fundamental changes. Instead, it will happily continue to chase individual bugs nearly to infinity. But, maybe your review skill is better than the ones I've tried.
pdntspa 19d ago
With the way memory systems work, I can see the value in having a different person's AI conduct the review as that AI's 'memory' is going to have a slightly different perspective aligned with the developer piloting it