Comic Code Reviews | Hacker News Reader

Comic Code Reviews

jona.ca

I’ve been experimenting with a way to make code reviews more understandable - turning tricky pull requests into short comic strips.

The blog post shows an example generated from a real PR: summarizing the changes, anthropomorphizing the components, and making the flow visually obvious. It’s meant to help reviewers grasp intent quickly and make reviews a bit more fun.

Curious whether others have tried visual or narrative aids in their review process, and whether this could be practical for real teams.

This could be a fun way to educate the judge about why my opposing counsel's position is laughably wrong.

Sadly, the fun would end with a reprimand or sanctions order. Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43866303 ("Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits").

Might work for bringing associate attorneys up to speed in a new case, or for teaching concepts to law students, though!

I think it’s a fun idea.

Not sure if it would be used, though. Being on HN front page helps.

It would also have to contain a lot of content, and be indexed well.

I really like the idea... but I have to admit my first visceral reaction was "I hate this". I think it's because the tone and style is quite infantile/childish. A good experiment nonetheless. Maybe there's a middle ground somewhere?

What’s your line for “childish“?

I’ve been guilty of injecting bits of whimsy, sarcasm, and other unserious behaviors in a corporate We Mean Business environment.

I’ve toned it down because I recognize some people are very resistant to seeing both the serious and humorous aspects of a situation at the same time.

Using visual approaches, including comics, is a reasonable idea I've been looking into personally as well (mostly using style transfer from manga). :)

But, the actual concepts communicated need to be clear. In your example strip here, it doesn't seem to be meeting that bar for a reviewer. :(

Keep at it though, as I get the feeling this is the kind of thing that will work after a few important "aha!" ideas and tweaks happen to the generating process. :)

I'm not against it, but this particular strip seemed a little incoherent. It might need manual storyboarding.

Isn't the first picture already misleading?

As far as I know, the order of hook calls is important to link them to the correct components: the important point of the linked list is not the ordering of built-in hooks depending ob name.

Although it's true that useEffect runs code after render. The picture places useReducer after useEffect, which would not even make sense in this interpretation?

Could be that I'm misremembering details, but I find it more interesting to read, for example, a good description, when a PR is large, dense, or hard to understand.

In the case of hooks, this blog post was good:

https://overreacted.io/why-do-hooks-rely-on-call-order/

I'm not sure whether the explanation in the picture is useful to anyone who doesn't already know the information.

Same issue with most AI-generated doc-blocks I've seem, often misleading, or explaining the obvious, instead of the "why".

Interesting idea but unfortunately the given example comic makes very little sense.

It was difficult to parse even as someone who's familiar with these concepts, and I think it will hurt more than help any newbies.

Exactly my thought. Can anyone here say otherwise?

I didn't have any trouble with the comic but I do already know these things about how react hooks work so I'm not going in fresh.

I think it's a little whimsical, perhaps too much for what info it conveys (a bullet list with the same component names would probably be equally informative), but I thought it was easy to understand and follow. I think there is -something- here; I don't need THIS comic but if it was more about the context and goals of the change then maybe that would be powerful. Especially if it was consistently done over many PRs.

I think this kind of slop has negative value. It's unclear how much of the information in the comic is hallucinated, and the malformed code "for i = i1+|>" and nonsense text "(starts write hooks!" doesn't bode well.

Definitely still needs a "human in the loop." I don't know if this particular comic was cherry-picked or if it was the first one generated by Nano-Banana Pro, but either way, it's still got plenty of messy typos.

  RULES OF HOORS? 
  Updste #2: setState
  Starts wite hooks!

>Definitely still needs a "human in the loop."

At which point I feel like I would rather the human have invested their time into writing a design doc that we could discuss well before they submitted a PR.

>> the given example comic makes very little sense.

I thought that was just due to it being about React.

It seems to me the level this comic is at is such that anyone who needs an aid like this would not be capable of providing a meaningful review on the pull request.

If the goal is to encourage rubber-stamping by bystanders, it might help.

It's valuable to make a difficult task easier, even for those who could do the task without the help.

I'd rather just have a high-level summary in English for that.

This seems to take dumbing-down beyond any sensible level.

People who dumb down seem to think it's easier to be dumb. Not everyone seems to agree, fortunately.

Is it making it easier? I feel like having to parse a comic like this is more cognitively demanding than just RTFCode, and I'd still have to review the code afterward to confirm its accuracy and whether the approach is sensical.

We are well and truly doomed. Why not just make it a TikTok.

https://www.revid.ai/tools/text-to-brainrot

https://www.inreels.ai/tools/text-to-brainrot

You actually might be on to something... AI aside, it's often a good idea to include visuals in a PR such as diagrams.

But having something like a comic where it's both visual and communicative in a more conversational/narrative way could prove pretty effective. Also if you can throw some humour in there, it could potentially add even more comprehensibility, etc.

Thanks for sharing!

I thought this was going to be about the Comics Code Authority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

I know this is hacker news but you do get all sorts posted here, that's my excuse.

You weren't the only one.

Meanwhile I've been watching a lot of standup lately and so my brain went to "video of person roasting the code review process".

I would suspect there's lots of overlap between the comic book collector/reader and hacker demographics anyway.

not sure about for pull requests, but for protocols it could be interesting.

I asked it to generate a comic for https negotiation over tcp https://imgur.com/a/0p0Pzum I think with a bit more prodding it might be interesting for documenting protocols

In the same way that many people would rather read imperfect ESL than LLM text, I would rather you draw stick figures yourself. The fact that this is a product of AI means anything I see in it may be 'hallucinated' or otherwise incorrect.

If it’s an addendum then fine. But can’t replace textual review which is much easier to parse, at least for me.

BTW, amazing they chose a review that exemplifies why hooks are a horrible horrible mistake for public API.

The example probably wasn't the best pick to demonstrate this, but I could see this making sense for e.g. linter rules (with fewer panels per rule).

Fun little comic :) wish it had more about WHY the rules exist, but I assume that would be hard to squish into a panel

Looks like a fun inclusion

ok fine I'll add another github workflow...

Any code review complicated enough to benefit from this should be split up into smaller units for review.

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