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I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't agree with:

> We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever

Things should 100% go to prod whenever they need to go to prod. While this in theory makes sense, there is insane amount of ceremony in large number of places I have seen personally where it takes an act of congress to deploy to production all the while it is just ceremony, people are hunting other people with links to PR sent to various slack channels "hey anyone available to take a look at this" and then someone is like "I know nothing about that service/system but I'll look at approve." I would wager a high wager that this "we must review every line of code" - where actually implemented - is largely a ceremony. Today I deployed three services to production without anyone looking at what I did. Deploying to production should absolutely be a non-event in places that are ran well and where right people are doing their jobs.

by alecbz2 hours ago|

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I'm sure some companies do this poorly but there's lots of places where code review happens on every PR and there's processes and systems in place to make sure it's an easy process (or at least, as easy as it should be). Many large tech companies have things pushed to prod automatically many, many times per day and still have code review for all changes going out.

by fragmede1 hours ago|

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Even with code review, a well configured CI/CD system is going to include a wealth of automated unit and integration tests, and then also a complex deploy system involving canaries and ramp-up and blue/green deployment and flags and monitoring and alerts that's backed by a pager and on-call rotation with runbooks. Code review simply will never be perfect and catch 100% of issues, so systems are designed with that in mind.

So then then question is what's actually reasonable given today's code generating tools? 0% review seems foolish but 100% seems similarly unreal. Automated code review systems like CodeRabbit are, dare I even say, reasonable as a first line of defense these days. It all comes down too developer velocity balanced with system stability. Error budgets like Google's SRE org is able to enforce against (some) services they support are one way of accomplishing that, but those are hard to put into practice.

So then, as you say, it takes an act of Congress to get anything deployed.

So in the abstract, imo it all comes down to the quality of the automated CI/CD system, and developers being on call for their service so they feel the pain of service unreliability and don't just throw code over the wall. But it's all talk at this level of abstraction. The reality of a given company's office politics and the amount of leverage the platform teams and whatever passes for SRE there have vs the rest of the company make all the difference.