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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately Github's code review is still a far cry from mature review tools like Phab or Gerrit. The code folding in the latter reviewers is always better and leaving inline notes does not apply as individual messages. The reviewee can also more easily reply to each line individually and it is much easier to compare previous diffs.

GH's code review tool doesn't seem useful for diffs longer than 20 lines or so. I'm curious why they've never bothered to address this shortcoming.

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AFAICT this stems from a different philosophy of what a code review should be for. GitHub appears to believe that code reviews should be very high-level, with most discussion focused on overall design issues and only the latest version of the code, rather than detailed line-by-line reviews of incremental changes. This attitude is shared by at least some number of GitHub users, since many people who visit https://reviewable.io (my attempt at a code review tool in the vein of Phab or Gerrit) don't even get why it might be needed. So perhaps GitHub is not entirely wrong... but it certainly opens up a nice niche for providing tools to those who like more thorough reviews.

In my experience of giving code reviews, I don't see how you would be able to achieve the same quality with just a high-level review. Coding standards and uniformity in code bases are so important, and you just can't achieve that with the high-level review

I wholeheartedly agree, but clearly other people have different thoughts or priorities. :)

Eh, I personally find GitHub more useful for line-by-line nitpicking than for high-level, architectural reviews. GitHub PR diffs encourage reading code in an arbitrary top-to-bottom order and don't make it easy to jump around and get the bigger picture.

Unless you mean that they don't place any importance on the diff at all, which I might be inclined to believe, but that leaves a lot of the onus on accurate, well-written PR descriptions… which not every developer seems to be capable of.

I like to check out the code and review locally.. It would be awesome of VS Code had a code review extension that hooked into GitHub's API...

I use reviewable and like it a lot better than github reviews if there's more than one commit in the pull request.

Thanks for making it!

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