The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/
The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

@baldur Great essay! I largely agree with it.

It's a throw-away line, but you say that "code review is the norm even though it’s largely useless as practised".

Why do you think it's useless/how could it be practiced better?

For my two cents:

I feel like code review is a bad way to catch bugs (yet another reason that "humans check all the AI output" is doomed to failure).

But I do think of it as a good way to keep a codebase consistent and to share knowledge between team members.

@ragman @baldur The domination of code review in the industry largely comes from the powerful mythology of the open source model (central maintainers/gatekeepers, distributed async contributors). Async individual work that fits in a Gantt chart is also the way most managers think, and modern era individualism means we are more inclined to play the blame game behind the comfort of our respective screens than really cooperate. In a lot of contexts though, synchronous collaboration through pair/mob programming ensures higher-fidelity shared knowledge, better focus and involvement during coding, creates a more immediate feedback loop on the quality of produced code and reduces the integration time of features.

@GuillaumeL @ragman @baldur

I don’t think this is true. It comes from software engineering studies done in the eighties, particularly at IBM. Admittedly few places do rigorous reviews the way IBM documented.

@lain_7 So, me and @GuillaumeL are specifically talking about the pull request style of code review, the one that was popularised by GitHub and is quite popular these days in tech and software dev, especially web.

Quite a few modern software dev practices have diverged considerably from the original methods while still keeping the names. TDD doesn't look like original TDD. Code review doesn't look like original code review. Agile isn't agile. Etc.

@ragman