Code review friction

Does your team agree on what code review is actually for?

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Somewhere on your team right now, an engineer is spending five minutes rewriting a two-sentence PR comment. They’re softening it. Adding a “maybe” here, a question mark there. Wondering if “consider” sounds too commanding or too passive. They’ll eventually settle on something that sounds polite but vague enough that the author won’t know whether to act on it.

Meanwhile, another engineer on your team is writing “just do X” and hitting submit without a second thought. Not out of malice - they just want to get through open PRs before standup.

Both of these people think the other one is doing it wrong. And you…