reviewing pull requests: challenging what we'll regret later

• “transparency”
• “growth”

reviewing pull requests isn’t about perfection. it’s about avoiding future headaches.

stop nitpicking over spaces and semicolons. stop obsessing over 100% code coverage like it’s a holy grail. that’s lazy thinking disguised as thoroughness. when i review, i ask: what will we regret not fixing now?

tests aren’t a safety net if they suck. writing tests to hit 100% coverage is like using duct tape to fix a leaky pipe: it looks fixed but still breaks when you need it most. write tests that break when something important fails, not tests that make your coverage report look pretty.

your CI is your best reviewer. it doesn’t get tired or miss edge cases when properly fed. when you spot a bug, write a regression test:don’t blame humans. expecting people to catch what robots should is backwards thinking.

lazy reviews are easy. good reviews hurt. anyone can skim and stamp “LGTM.” anyone can nitpick variable names. real reviews say “add a test for this” and challenge assumptions. a good review might piss people off: but it’ll save future you from 3am debugging hell.

fix things, don’t workshop them to death. when bugs happen, write a regression test and fix it. endless post-mortems are procrastination dressed up as productivity.

complexity is evil. kill it. if you had to stop and think, others will too. simplify or comment. complexity piles up until it suffocates your project.

match reviewers to their superpowers. don’t assign reviews democratically. find the person who knows where the bodies are buried. sometimes that means waiting for the domain expert.

ask the big question: what will future us hate about this?

it’s not about whether it works now: it’s about whether it’ll work next year when someone else touches it.

stop reviewing. start preventing.