In What to do about excessive (good) PR comments I wrote that a PR with a lot of good, actionable comments might be a sign that the author didn’t do enough beforehand to post an acceptable PR. It depends on many factors. For example, a new hire or junior developer might still need training, and so you would expect PRs to need some work,

But, there are some things that should never make it to review. We have linters and automatic code formatters, so we should never be correcting indentation in a review. If you use Rust, you are never finding a dangling pointer bug. There are automated tools for finding accessibility issues and security issues—which aren’t perfect, but they are probably better (and definitely faster) than most humans. All of these tools are somewhat mechanical, though, built on parser technology. We can do “better” with AI.

AI writes code good enough to be a starting point, and it can also review code. Since I think that the point of code reviews is information sharing, we wouldn’t want to replace them with AI. But AI is the perfect thing to use on yourself to make sure you don’t open PRs with obvious problems that slow down the review.