Who has enjoyed using PR code reviewers? What worked and what didn’t?
I’m curious about people’s experiences with pull request code reviewers, both human and automated.
For those who have used PR review tools or bots:
What did you actually find helpful?
What ended up being annoying or counterproductive?
At what point did you stop paying attention to the feedback?
I’m particularly interested in how people balance signal vs noise in reviews, and whether summaries, inline comments, or opt-in depth work better in practice.
Asking to understand real usage patterns and pain points, not to promote anything. Happy to just listen.
We're using CodeRabbit at work, and it has been pretty positive overall. Especially once we turned off the poems and sequence diagram noise. Useful enough that I'm looking at paying for it for side projects when I am the sole developer.
That makes sense. A lot of these tools seem to become useful once the extra noise is turned down. I’m actually building and testing a quieter review approach myself and trying to understand what really helps in day-to-day use. would you like to give it a try?
I am using dependabot, grouped dependencies once a week.
We started by having it doing PR for every single dependencies update every day, but that was a little too much noise
But i depends on how big your team is
Yes, team size really changes the dynamics. We ran into similar issues when reviews started taking over entire days. I’m building and testing a quieter review approach that only goes deeper when asked, and I’m trying to understand where that tradeoff works best. would you like to try it out? your feedback will help me to improve it further.