#codereview

On a lot of teams, code that a pair of devs wrote usually gets a lighter code review. Nobody wrote that rule down and nobody voted on it, but pairing earned it. Here's what the research actually says about that discount, why it's never one flat size, and what happens when dev + agent starts getting filed under the same category.

When making something gets cheap but judging it stays expensive, the cost slides downstream...social media did it to your feed, AI code generation does it to your repo. The difference is a bad post washes away by morning, and a bad merge sits there for years.

Big PRs don't come from lazy engineers. They come from a skill almost nobody gets taught: how to cut a piece of work down into small, reviewable chunks. Here's why that's still the highest-leverage habit in engineering... and why AI just made it matter more, not less.

Most merge standards are wiki decoration. What makes a team actually follow them isn't the list...it's enforcement, consistency, and the why.

Most code-review checklists ask "does this work?" The harder question is "what happens when it doesn't?" Five things I check on every PR that the standard checklists miss... plus the comment grammar that makes reviews actually move.