I like it... I often find that there are two ways to do something, and it's
nice to be able to convey why a specific direction was chosen. Also, I often
DO need feedback, and this is a good way to convey it.
On Thursday, February 19, 2026 at 09:14:52 PM EST, David Smiley
<[email protected]> wrote:
Some years ago, I started doing self code-reviews for most of my PRs. It
allows in-line elaborations of the changes (that are *not* better put as
code comments), and it sometimes reveals little accidents / things I
overlooked and need to follow-up on. It helps other human reviewers
understand / trust what was done, which ultimately leads to better / more
efficient peer review. I review lots of PRs, and I appreciate this a lot
when I see it! It seems more common now.
In the current age of AI with total/mixed/unknown provenance of a PR, I
think this practice is even more important. It helps demonstrate to other
reviewers that the human author/contributor has taken responsibility for
what they are presenting for anything non-trivial by reviewing it
themselves. When I don't see a self review, and I see some questionable
things, I begin to lose trust and wonder "did you even look at this" and
feel my reviewing time was taken for granted / wasted.
This may not have presented a problem here yet; I'm not motivated by an
experience in this community. Well not recently, anyway. Nonetheless,
given the benefits of self code reviews, I'd like to edit our PR template
to *recommend* that a self-review be done immediately afterwards,
particualrly for anything non-obvious.
Any thoughts on this?
~ David Smiley
Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley
