Receiving code review

Receiving code review

Trigger. A reviewer — human or agent — has left comments on your change: inline notes, a change request, a design objection, or a question you are not sure how to answer.

Reference material (comment triage table with worked replies, handling a reviewer who is wrong, scope-creep boundaries, and review of agent-authored changes): see reference.md in this directory.

The rule

Every comment gets a decision and a reply. Disagreement is fine; silence is not.

Two symmetrical failures, and the second is the one people underestimate:

• Reflexive compliance. Making every requested change without evaluating it. Reviewers are frequently right and occasionally wrong, and a change you made without agreeing with it is a change nobody understands. Worse, "done" on a request you misread produces a defect with a reviewer's name on it.
• Reflexive defence. Explaining why each comment is unnecessary. This converts review into negotiation and costs you the thing review is for.

The correct posture is neither: evaluate, decide, and say what you decided.

Triage every comment

Classify before responding. The category determines the reply.

Category	What it is	Response
Defect	The code is wrong; reviewer showed how	Fix, verify, reply with the evidence
Risk	Not wrong today, fragile tomorrow	Fix, or record why the risk is accepted
Design	A different approach is preferred	Engage on merits; one of you updates
Preference	Style with no correctness content	Accept by default — it is their codebase too
Question	Reviewer does not understand something	Answer; then ask if the code should have
Misunderstanding	Reviewer read it wrong	Clarify, and check what misled them

Two rules that fall out of this table:

• Accept preferences cheaply. Arguing naming or formatting spends credibility you will want for a design disagreement later.
• A question is a signal. If a reviewer had to ask what the code does, the answer usually belongs in the code — a name, a comment, a test — not only in the reply thread.

Working the feedback

1. Read everything first. Do not start editing on comment one. Later comments frequently reframe earlier ones, and a reviewer's last note may say "actually, ignore the above."
2. Group by category and by file. Related fixes land together and are easier to re-review.
3. Make the changes. Each one is a real change: verify it as you would any other. A fix applied to satisfy a comment, untested, is a regression with extra steps.
4. Re-run the full gate, not the file you touched. Review fixes break other things at roughly the rate original changes do.
5. Reply to each thread with what you did — or did not do, and why.

Replying

Say the decision, then the evidence. Keep it short.

Fixed:

Fixed in parser.py:88 — the split now bounds on the first colon only. test_config_key_with_colon covers it; it failed before the change.

Disagreeing:

I'd rather keep the loop here. itertools.groupby requires the input to be pre-sorted and this iterator is streaming, so we'd add an O(n log n) sort and buffer the whole stream to save four lines. Happy to change it if you still prefer the shorter form.

That is the shape: a reason grounded in something checkable, and an explicit willingness to be overruled. Compare with "I think this is clearer", which is an assertion the reviewer cannot evaluate.

Deferring:

Agreed, but out of scope for this change — it touches the v1 handlers I deliberately excluded. Filed as #412.

Deferring is legitimate only with a record. "Later" without a ticket is "never" with better manners.

Scope discipline

The pull to fix adjacent things while you are in the file is strong and almost always wrong. It grows the diff, buries the reviewed change, and restarts the review.

• Unrelated bug spotted → separate change.
• Reviewer asks for something beyond the stated scope → say so, agree where it belongs, do it there.
• Refactor that would make the fix cleaner → land the fix, then the refactor, in that order and separately.

When not to use

• You are giving review, not receiving it.
• You are preparing the change, checking CI, or writing release notes — that is the project's PR and release workflow.
• The project defines its own review protocol or approval rules; follow it.