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View original post on X: Santiago
Published
13/100

Measure total time, not review time, to judge agentic code reviews

AISantiago argues that developers celebrating time saved from agent code reviews should measure the whole cycle, including review feedback, fixing bugs that escape review, and incident handling. He recommends comparing total time per PR or per change against the pre-agent baseline.
SantiagoVerified on X
@svpino
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People are celebrating how much time they're saving by letting agents review their code.

But be honest: how much time are you spending fixing bugs afterward?

Saving two hours on code review means nothing if you then spend four hours fixing problems.

If you really want to know whether your automated code reviews are saving you time, you gotta measure the whole thing:

1. Track how much time you spend reviewing code, including the agent's feedback.

2. Track how much time you spend fixing bugs that make it past review.

3. Track how much time you spend investigating incidents and dealing with affected customers.

Compare the total time with what it took before introducing agentic reviews. Ideally, measure it per PR or per change so you're comparing similar workloads.

At the end of the day, nobody cares how much time you are saving on a particular task.

The ultimate goal is to save more time overall without deploying crap to production.

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Santiago · x.comPublished · added here

Original title: People are celebrating how much time they're saving by letting agents review their code.