Ask HN: How are you doing code reviews in the era of GenAI?
1 lenerdenator 4 7/1/2025, 3:23:16 PM
I'm a more senior member on my team, and like many software engineering companies, we're using various GenAI technologies like LLMs and agentic AI to help with coding tasks.
The good news is, it does increase the output of less-experienced developers. The bad news is, it also increases the output of less-experienced developers.
We use a fairly standard code review process: make a PR, have it pass CI/CD tests, have other developers review, and merge into main if approved. The problem is that we are getting a larger volume of PRs to review and it's beginning to cut into the productivity of more senior members of the team.
How do you handle this increase in PR review activity?
I've seen teams try too hard to keep the seniors "productive", and they just end up with the juniors/mids bottlenecked because their code never gets reviewed. So if you measure productivity by overall flow of code through your process (think Kanban, not Scrum), you'll be able to resolve this conundrum.
We're doing more of the latter suggestion, though that is coming with more "reviewer's burnout". We are trying to deal with it through smaller PRs, but then of course, you fall back to the problem of having more of them.