Make Reviews Possible Again With This One Simple Trick

Summary

Make Reviews Possible Again With This One Simple Trick Posted on July 24, 2026 by Noon van der Silk A stack of branches. You might’ve already guessed what it is: stacked branches. But if you didn’t already know that, don’t worry, we’ll go over it shortly. But first, let’s discuss the problem. AI-generated code is hard to review Pretty much everyone using AI has this problem at the moment; it’s moderately easy to generate code that is mostly coherent, mostly tackles the problem you’re solving, and in fact it’s so easy, we mostly get a little over-excited and do too much at once: this makes code hard to review. This is creating stress on the reviewers, on several fronts. There’s just the plain apathy of staring a giant diff that probably does what the author says, even passes your test suites, but also probably contains some quirky/not-your-codebase’s-idiom things that you’d challenge if you were motivated. There’s also the loss of knowledge; it’s just straight-up extremely difficult to read such large pieces of work and understand everything. Especially when you can’t totally trust that every line and comment comes from some deep fundamental understanding of the (human) author. There’s many other problems; not all of which will be addressed by this idea; but the key idea here that we will go for is: less is better. It’s easier to review something when the amount of changes are small; and when you can focus on just thinking about “one thing”, while performing any specific review. Standard techniques There are many and ever-growing techniques to deal with this problem: Just add more tests: Theory is, if it works then It Works. This can be risky or great, depending on your testing infrastructure. But we all know that tests don’t cover everything that it’s possible to express with code. Just do less: Just have smaller PRs. This is hard, because it seems modern AI systems tend to be a little bit purposefully addictive/gamified: they’re often finding new things to do while...