Code Review Is the Hard Part · Olaf Aldersskip to content<br>#Open Source#GitHub#community#LLM<br>Code Review Is the Hard Part<br>by Olaf Alders<br>July 26, 2026<br>·2 min read<br>·376 words
"Using a Magnifying Glass and Driving" by Mike "Dakinewavamon" Kline is licensed under CC BY 2.0.<br>There is currently some recognition of the fact that with code creation having<br>become cheaper, the burden of code review has not necessarily become easier.<br>This is especially the case for people who get LLM-written pull requests who<br>don’t use LLM tools for review. I can only imagine how exhausting it must be. I<br>have only seen one complete waste of time pull request on one of my projects,<br>but it was pretty irritating. Having said this, for some of my projects, review<br>has been the hard part for many years already. It’s often easy to send a drive-by<br>pull request but it can be much harder to find a competent, careful reviewer<br>who is familiar with a whole bunch of RFCs, some superseding the others, who<br>can say “this is correct and probably won’t break a bunch of legacy code you<br>don’t know about”.<br>Add to this the fact that you don’t get much credit on GitHub for “spent X<br>hours in careful review of brittle pull request that had Y sharp edges that the<br>contributor never considered”, but you do get kudos for every one of the low<br>effort pull requests that you send (I’m looking at you, Hacktoberfest).<br>If you’re doing it for the likes, then code review is not the way to go, even if<br>it’s equally as important as writing the code.<br>I don’t have an actual solution for this. I’m just saying that the gatekeepers<br>in my universe seem to be in short supply.<br>Do I use LLMs for code review? I do, but while I might trust the LLMs to find a<br>lot of the problems in a pull request, I don’t trust them to find all of the<br>problems and I certainly don’t trust them to be the final arbiter of code<br>correctness. For any non-trivial change to Open Source code that actually<br>matters, I don’t see a good way to keep a human out of the loop. I write a lot<br>of Open Source that doesn’t matter, but if it’s actually something that people<br>use, I feel a responsibility to make a best effort not to explode whatever<br>they’re working on.
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