On: Comic Code Reviews

[JonathanAquino]

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.

[treetalker → JonathanAquino]

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!

[moritzwarhier → JonathanAquino]

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".

[klooney → JonathanAquino]

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

[justinclift → JonathanAquino]

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. :)

[guitarbill → JonathanAquino]

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?

[shermantanktop → guitarbill]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY → JonathanAquino]

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.