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2026-05-04·Ada Osei·6 min
Code review is a writing exercise
The best reviewers on our team are not the fastest readers of code. They are the most careful writers of comments.
A review comment is a tiny piece of technical writing with a hostile audience: a tired author who wants to merge. Precision and kindness are not in tension there — they are the same skill.
We rewrote our review guidelines around sentences, not checklists. Say what you observed, say why it matters, say what you would accept. Three sentences, no verdicts without reasons.
Review latency dropped by half. Not because people read faster, but because nobody has to decode what a one-word comment meant.