Last Updated on November 12, 2025 by stlplace
Code Review
At my current work place recently we switched from Atlassian’s Bitbucket (stash) to Microsoft’s GitHub for our source code version control system. Along with that, we get the GitHub Action (which is somewhat like Jenkins, the CI/CD tool) as well as Copilot Code Review and other Copilot tools.
Let me talk about Copilot Code Review first. In general I say it’s pretty good, with its quick human readable overview or summary for the code change. I think it’s probably better than I would write myself: if I ever have to write such a summary.
Now, the code review comments. There are various levels of comments in terms of severity. If you have done any code review, you will probably know quite a bit of suggestions or feedback are subjective, because coding is still not exact science, or like some of the other disciplines such as Mechanical Engineering. I will categorize the comments below:
- Nitpick: Copilot actually says that word. We can ignore those.
- Format or spacing, we can accept the suggestions, and commit directly. That’s probably the only place we can directly commit.
- Other suggestions: I think most are valid. And we should try to incorporate them in our coding. For example: things around better error handling, more robust code, efficiency, break out functions from common code (copy and paste code), and so on. This including feedback on the unit testing too. One thing to keep in mind, always run unit test or debug the code changes before we commit, don’t just commit the code change in the web browser. Because I learned the lesson hard way: I commit code directly, then I realized that I broke the CI (continuous integration) build.
Coding Assistant
My own exp: I have done a bit experiment on this, both via the Copilot inside IntelliJ and VS Code. I will continue use Copilot. Somewhat like code review suggestions: coding assistant (or Q&A) is not AI does the coding for us, we still need to think about the usual stuff: design, testing scenario, debugging, and so on. Again we can think copilot as a colleague or a coworker in pair programming, but we always need to verify in addition to the usual “trust”.
I noticed one approach that one coworker was using. Ask Copilot questions, and use the answers directly, and so on. It seems to me this is a bit like a junior engineer’s approach. And I can see one downside of this approach, see below picture, original source: this is a joke but it has some truth.
I have done similar things in the past, except before all the AI tools, I was mostly googling, including using answers from stackoverflow.