@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.
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.