It’s certainly more reliable than the evaluation of the person whose job depends on it being evaluated as correct.
Someone who doesn’t understand engineering at that scale would presume it’s the structure of the if statements. And sure, if that’s what you’re looking for, print out some lines and let a person lacking all context take a look.
You could probably call out the bullshitters, though. They aren't refactoring the code base.
Or the folio patchset. People had a variety of reactions to it, whole lot of energy was spent evaluating that code (which in the end also made it in)
The person whose job it was to make the patch and who has interest in it being correct is not necessarily less reliable than a random HN commenter
You would probably think otherwise if it was your code and some other random commenter with no domain knowledge evaluating it, wouldn't you?
Yeah, I'm sure it's of value to have Tesla engineers come in and spend the 3 months to a year getting enough context with the code base to be be able to produce useful and informed critiques.