Ask HN: Reviewing code on your phone, yay or nay?

[changisaac]

Not sure if it's just me, but I've often found myself looking at PRs on my phone in my downtime. Think chilling on the couch (when working at home), commuting, running an errand. Sometimes I'm out walking my cat (yes cat, he likes walks), and I get a ping for review and want to look at it right away.

I use the GitHub mobile app but there are obvious limitations to the experience:

1. Basically any change beyond around ~50 lines of code is hard to navigate. Results in a lot of scrolling back and forth (and left and right).

2. Writing any comments beyond a simple 1-2 liner is hard. I'm also definitely not gonna be doing things like referencing files or including code suggestions / samples since I can't copy paste stuff easily.

3. On my computer, I would sometimes do stuff like ctrl+f my codebase or other repos while reviewing, and doing ChatGPT searches to verify lib usage. I'm not gonna be doing these things on mobile either.

So this limits my "phone" code reviews to basically only small sub-50 lines PRs that I can hopefully just LGTM and approve right away.

But I wish I could do more, tbh as a SWE I also just want to walk around more lol (productively), my back hurts ahaha.

So what do you guys think, is this a dum thing to want? Or do you feel the same?

[bediger4000]

Nay. It's bad enough looking at just green and pink blobs and okaying the diff without context. Tiny little phone screens make looking at more context, which is often necessary for a good review, much harder.

[changisaac → bediger4000]

Good points, I think I agree with your points here, really hard to search for and view more context. Assuming these can be remedied somehow though, is the prospect of doing mobile reviews while you walk around something you'd be want?