this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
172 points (99.4% liked)
Programming
26304 readers
1077 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I find most bad codebases exist because of a culture that isn't focused on quality, and I'm not talking about bug counts or code coverage. Clean codebases stay clean by being proactive about keeping them clean. This should include meticulous peer reviews, establishing design patterns, enforcing best practices, and taking initiative to leave things better than you found them (we used to call that boy scouting).
If your teams PR comments only contain LGTM, and the average time spent reviewing them is 5 minutes, your team isn't focused on quality. If a PR contains more files than an average person can keep in their mental context window, it won't get the attention it needs to be properly reviewed. If there is no accountability to keep a clean codebase, you'll end up with 2 hours of work taking 5 days to complete.
The signal-to-noise ratio of reviews is nearly zero in my experience. It’s for the least productive people on the team to argue about spaces or gotos or grind other ideological axes.
I find PRs really dumb things down, but not in a way that makes code more understandable. And it certainly doesn’t improve quality.
My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.
My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I've seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.