CLI, GUI, or Just Blind Trust? A Tour of Code Review Styles

So I'm going to give you an idea about how people are doing a review. It's been 16 years. Who remembers that? But it was 16 years ago, not 16, 18 years ago, when GitHub was launched. And then we have been doing the review the same way, the GUI. I'm not sure how people are doing it, but that's how we did it for almost 16 years, and then agents changed how we write code. It changed for everyone, right? Everyone is now more productive, more fast. I mean, yeah, we can agree to disagree that we are more productive, but your company never agrees to that. That's why we are not getting raised.

And then agents are actually writing code faster than someone can review, and it's now a bottleneck, right? But people are from the community, they are actually trying to revisit how we should be doing the code review. Let me show you a small UI. So believe me, this UI is not for humans. Forget about agents. No one can read this. But this is how we are doing code review right now.

Most of us are actually using an AI review tool or even in-person review or someone, your senior who is doing a review. And you have so many comments, no one can read it. So how community is actually catching up with the change of the era, which is AI era now. So there are multiple ways people are doing it. Of course, people love CLI, right? This is where it started.

Some months ago, I mean, it's moving so fast, like it was just a few months ago, people were saying, oh, you know, IDs are dead. And everyone loves CLI. So people were doing CLI. So people were running the code review in the CLI. So this is still, there are still people who are doing this. So this is one way to do your code review, right? Just open the CLI and run your coding agent or review agent and then it does the review.

And the advantage is you don't have to actually go to that nice view I just showed you a few moments ago and read through the entire line of code, which sometimes, just agree, let's agree. Most of the time doesn't work, right? What next? People are still there who love IDE. And now people are actually also doing or using the IDEs to do the code review. So this is another set of people who are like, okay, yeah, web doesn't work anymore for larger diffs or larger PRs. So let's do it using IDE, the people who are still doing it using CodeX, cloud code, right?

So they can give you, show you the diff and you can do your review there and then maybe talk to your friends, like what needs to be changed. And now agentic era, right? So people are like, oh look, I'm not even looking at my code. So I'm all cool. And now all the code review agents also support the agentic way of writing or reviewing the code where they can actually just run in the loop, you can just run the agent, it does the review, pushes the fix, checks again, until there is a zero review comments and then you are all happy because your UI looked really nice, because there are no comments to solve.

So this is another way. But we still think there needs to be something which is for both human and agents. So at CodeRabbit, we are actually trying to change this view. The same view which you saw in GitHub looks more slick and cleaner with the new view actually we are trying to do. So here what we are doing is we are trying to bring all the context about the code changes, all the files you can see, but for ages GitHub has been giving us the same view, whereas in alphabetical order. The files are alphabetical order. I'm sure like you might have all noticed that. But we are trying to actually bring and club the files together as an engineer might have written that.

So it starts from the files which probably I, as an engineer, started creating first. For example, maybe models, right? And then I went ahead and wrote services, and we tried to do the same here by using something the concept of something known as layers. So if you see there on the right-hand corner, it's called layers. And the left-hand side, we are trying to show you all the comments, all the context, all the information about the code. And we also have our AI agent available there. So you can talk to agent and see like if something needs to be improved or something needs to be maybe not fixed. And you can do all in a single view. So this is the new view we are trying, and CodeRabbit is free for open source.

So you can actually just go ahead and give it a try today. You don't have to even come to me and pay money. So just go ahead and try. It's free for open source. And if you are in open source projects, just talk to me. Maybe I can do something more for you. Because we have $1 million fund to support open source projects. And we have been already doing that for so many projects. But there are still old school engineers. Who has been doing this? I'm sure most of us do this. Looks good to me.

And let's go. And then there is a staff or principle engineer who looks at your single line PR and gives you 50 comments. And you are like, why? But yeah, people exist, right? And then there are white coders who are actually... Oh, who needs a code review? My agent is actually doing a perfect job. It writes perfect code. And after a few weeks, they think about where is my database gone? And yeah, the cycle continues. If you have time, you can scan this code and tell me how you are doing the review. But not required. You can just skip that. But I'm also done with my talk.