How the Claude Code team does code review (claude.dev)
136 points by pretext 3 hours ago
status_quo69 an hour ago
No wonder most people at Anthropic believe our jobs are in jeopardy, they've already made a system wherein the machines are treating them like pets.
I really don't get the tendency here from Anthropic to describe what's most likely churn? A high pressure amount of changes/PRs a day on a TUI to wrap a while loop? I'm not going to be a reductionist here so I'm going to cut it off there, I'm positive that the complexity of handling multiple terminal emulators is something that needs some handling (even if doing their own rendering engine was a self made problem). Yes I've vibe coded my own harness from scratch without writing any of it, I still know how it works.
I'm also not sure that they addressed point 2 in any actual capacity? They say "the system verifies itself" which is cool and is something that automated testing has done for decades, but they eschew the mental model of how the system works as a whole and prefer instead to have the LLM focus and summarize a slice of the system when they need to know about it or ask for it. But.... That's not knowledge? That's just search a la google? And thus seems to be subject to the same problems where the quality of your search dictates the quality of your knowledge that you surface at any given time?
N.B. Changed "1000 PRs" to "A high pressure amount" to be vague since the article is vague here on what CC undergoes.
jonahx 19 minutes ago
> have the LLM focus and summarize a slice of the system when they need to know about it or ask for it. But.... That's not knowledge? That's just search a la google? And thus seems to be subject to the same problems where the quality of your search dictates the quality of your knowledge that you surface at any given time?
This is the crux. Take pause, because hidden here is a sea-change in our fundamental trust model of software...
There is no longer anyone to turn to if this system breaks by, eg, having a critical bug that no one can figure out. No causal model in anyone's head that can be appealed to, to slowly and methodically debug. By design, the system is too large for that, and everything hinges on Claude itself being able to find and understand the right slice of the system in any situation. As long as that very new invariant holds, everything will be all right. If it fails catastrophically, there is no recovery. You are the owner of a recovered alien spacecraft with tech you have no hope of understanding.
The new trust model is: We trust Claude to always understand the system enough to debug anything or make any reasonable change we could want. The risk might be worth the reward. But it's worth explicitly laying out the deal we're making.
Tbf, it's worth pointing that many large legacy systems already work like that (sort of), with "Claude" replaced by "whoever happens to be maintaining it this year".
Terr_ an hour ago
> wherein the machines are treating them like pets
I know some people will groan hearing the phrase again, but: "Reverse centaur." A centaur is a synergistic combination of two things, but now those things are in the wrong position: The human is the computer's tool.
Naturally, how "wrong" it is tends to depend on whether you ask the people who do all the work or the people who own all the computer-capital.
hgh 13 minutes ago
I think it's just a different focus on what matters.
There's clearly enormous (human) work that goes in to building and tuning their models.
The software they develop around their model is, relatively, trivial. It's not clear that enormous amounts of (human) energy need to go in to that code.
It seems largely a function of applying human energy towards the things that are marginally most important to generating you money and putting you in front of competitors.
xyzsparetimexyz 5 minutes ago
>The software they develop around their model is, relatively, trivial
30,000 changes a day is not my idea of trivial.
markbao 27 minutes ago
> I really don't get the tendency here from Anthropic to describe what's most likely churn? 1000 "PRs" a day on a TUI to wrap a while loop?
From the article, the 30,000 changes a month are in the monorepo, and Claude Code is in a separate repo. So it’s not the TUI that has 1,000 PRs a day.
I could easily see 1,000 PRs a day on the backend. Big tech was doing more than that pre-AI.
status_quo69 20 minutes ago
Fair enough, I did invent the 1000 a day because the article was vague, I'll edit my submission accordingly to also be vague
frereubu 22 minutes ago
My favourite quote at the moment: "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?" Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872
mk12 an hour ago
I saw someone say the other day (in response to another blog post being well written) that Anthropic employees have a rule against using AI for writing/external comms? That seems clearly not the case here, normal people don't write like this:
> Most of the path is automated; a person's attention goes where the risk is
> The eval grows with every incident, and every change to the reviewer is scored against all of it.
jazzyjackson 43 minutes ago
100%, although if people are getting 90% of their interaction from a robot, one may start to pick up some vocal tics and colloquialisms from machine world. a kind of robo-pidgin.
jansport123 34 minutes ago
this definitely seemed like something claude generated, i know because i frequently do all my research in chat and then ask it to generate a doc based on what we talked about and when i read what it generates the verbosity, the style it writes in makes me delete the whole thing. I would never subject readers to that.
paimapi 39 minutes ago
Pangram reports 80% of the text is AI-generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/72309aad-6e3f-4002-bdc5-c062...
compounding-err 5 minutes ago
I think this is the future. Im more bullish than bearish. The only issue is that eventually human verification can no longer be possible and we will have to live under AI-verification assumptions....
grey-area an hour ago
At 30k commits a day, is there anything that can meaningfully be called review?
stillpointlab an hour ago
I'm thinking about high volume mass manufacturing as an example here. I like those "How it is made" type YouTube videos. You see a production line that has some kind of QA process where cameras + automated systems do spot checks at high speeds and these crazy actuators are punching out bad examples. These processes often also involve spot checks where some statistical sample is selected and viewed carefully.
I don't think we've gotten to that level of reliable review with code, but I don't see any reason we can't continue moving in that direction.
fipar an hour ago
I really like those videos too, but a very big difference is, in manufacturing QA, the system outputs a very high number of copies of a very small number of possible types, so spot checks work fine from an operations research point of view, as the variance in output has a known upper bound.
For code, I think things go in the opposite direction: the system outputs artifacts that are all different among themselves (even more so now that we no longer distribute software via physical copies. Well, bits are always physical, but I mean we no longer ship floppies/CDs/DVDs).
That said, at least in my experience, code review has never been a direct part of factory-line-type QA. That QA is typically done by treating software as a black box and just verifying that it complies with a spec (often times based on a very loose definition of "spec" ...), and this is something that works equally well regardless of whether a human or a machine wrote the software. The type of QA that is done (among other things) by code reviews is checking whether the software's design is such that it will be economically feasible to maintain and extend it, for example.
The one part the code reviews takes a part of (but is in no way error-free) and that you just can't do with black-box testing (or it is much harder to do) is to look for things like backdoors. As our industry moves more towards "agents write software and tests validate that it works," I think a lot about "Reflections on Trusting Trust" and the new and wide attack surface added by people no longer reading the code shipped on their behalf.
grey-area an hour ago
That’s a category error. Software isn’t stamping out the same part again and again; if it were review would be simple. Analogies often mislead.
Of course Anthropic would love you to think you are heading towards that future so we have to bear in mind their livelihood depends on LLMs being the future of work and 30k changes a day being normal.
But why would we want 30k changes a day in a given product, what possible justification could there be?
stillpointlab an hour ago
0c3ca83 12 minutes ago
Those manufacturing videos are of someone making the exact same thing over and over. Months and years of testing go into ensuring that there is no change in the system, and continuous monitoring is put in place so that if any changes slip in, it can be undone. The design is set in stone, as it should be, and variations are bugs. There are months to years of cheap prototypes, iteration, design changes, pipeline tuning, and verification to ensure that nothing will need to change for the next million items.
If you want a software analogy to those devices getting churned off the assembly lines, it's the TCP streams coming out of your network card, with crazy checksums punching out bad packets.
We're orders of magnitude better at reliability with code, but we're regressing on that metric rather quickly. And the comment above deeply misunderstands both manufacturing and software.
jeremyjh 44 minutes ago
Those machines are not doing design work. They automate production of designs that had long development and testing lifecycles. Code is design. The compiler is the automated production process.
mirekrusin 37 minutes ago
It's conducting/steering/oversight/supervision, not reviewing.
swaptr 32 minutes ago
I dont believe it, its FOMO marketing to me.
mstaoru 43 minutes ago
Before all came to this, I've been promoting reviews at $dayjob not as gatekeeping but as method to exchange information and build more team spirit. We are an internal service team working by "projects", which makes us a very disjointed team with barely any communication. (Part of it is also German work culture.)
And now this. Suffice to say, my efforts did not bear fruit. I feel more isolated than ever before.
YmFzZTY0ZGFkZHk 2 hours ago
And so the wildly unprofitable AI company explains how it token maxes it's code and review process.
Authors should really try and view this article from the perspective of someone who has to think about cost to use the models.
enraged_camel an hour ago
Anthropic has been profitable for the past two quarters.
tedd4u an hour ago
"Anthropic told investors that it will profit on a measure called adjusted operating income.
"According to the report, adjusted operating income excludes stock-based compensation, which is not unusual for technology companies. However, the report also quotes its gross margins - above 80% - exclude revenue shared with distribution partners, as well as the cost of training its models."
From https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2026091414/the-...
trog 30 minutes ago
rhdunn an hour ago
How so? Can you link to the numbers?
Antropic's revenue is up [1], [2], [3] and if you calculate adjusted operating income (by excluding most expenses like training costs) then by that measure it is profitable. However, if you factor in all the numbers it is operating at a loss.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-v...
[2] https://fortune.com/2026/09/29/anthropic-leaked-ipo-prospect...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/15/anthropics-third-quarter-rev...
layoric an hour ago
Source? Only reports I’ve seen was they were profitable for one month in last quarter due to xAI discount of renting out colossus . Be interested to learn otherwise.
YmFzZTY0ZGFkZHk an hour ago
Profitable as in after expenses.
tracerbulletx 44 minutes ago
“I think that, every time you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the words "bullshit earnings.” ― Charles T. Munger
And what they're reporting is adjusted even further than EBITDA
surgical_fire an hour ago
We're talking about being actually profitable, not fake profitable.
adammarples an hour ago
Yes when you subtract expenses and capex
koolba 2 hours ago
> Low - Docs, copy, internal-only features, additive changes behind a flag
> None required once automated review and security checks are green
How anybody can let an LLM write docs and not even read them is pure insanity.
RGS1811 2 hours ago
How is the ability of a human to understand the code via hands-on familiarity not a direct dependency of their ability to do manual code review? I don't get it. Having claude write an explainer (something I do a lot!) doesn't get you to the point where you can confidently assess a complex diff. And you've funneled your priors on what the diff says and does through the same system that already reviewed and approved it. This article isn't bad but it doesn't give enough weight to the human context-building part of the problem.
jazzyjackson 36 minutes ago
Yes it used to be said, the code is not the asset, the people who know what the code does and how to change it are the asset.
Now we’re just going to outsource our capacity to design and review because it’s faster that way, as if the thing that was wrong with the software industry was that releases weren’t being pushed out often enough.
vatsachak 39 minutes ago
Mfw tui needs a billion prs per day.
Opus 5.5 is obviously stellar but come on what are you doing lol
vavkamil 2 hours ago
> Security gets its own automated review too. ... You either fix it or close the thread with a short reason, which is how you clear a false positive.
I hope this is only for low-risk false positives. Dismissing a critical finding as a false positive should still involve AppSec.
You could improve revert rates while simultaneously introducing more security vulnerabilities.
And the linked "claude-code-security-review" explicitly states in the README
> This action is not hardened against prompt injection attacks
That's a significant limitation for an AI security review control, no?
jwpapi 2 hours ago
What I’m more worried about is feature identification and how to monitor them. How can you get the product to the next level?
Honestly I’m not worried about code anymore in my codebase I’ve not had bug problems for a while and incidents get fixed automatically.
I monitor new features with an agent who checks recordings.
Most actually good features need still 20-30 iterations to design the userflow to actually be interactive, but then there is also another challenge to translate usage patterns into features and how to present functionality with the least amount of friction as possible.
How to efficiently run monitors without wasting your token spends. A best 'monitor' best practice would be nice.
Still this article was very helpful and gave me a lot of new ideas.
hyperpape 2 hours ago
I'm somewhat surprised they would say Claude is writing 90% of their code at this point. Did they get tired of reporting new milestones, or has there been a plateau?
visarga an hour ago
All good ideas, I have been doing something similar for half a year. The most important thing is to reduce bugs and ensure the code does what you wanted. Writing code tests, logging, interacting with the running app are essential. For intent realignment I like to have the agent re-read all user messages posted in that project. It only takes a few minutes even on a 10,000 message project. Then use this fresh derivation of user intent to check code and tests. For long spans of work I prefer to generate a todo list which remains as a document in the project. Each closed gate tracks feedback from the agent on what happened. This task file is also reviewed twice - once before implementation and once after. So the formula is - review agents - tests - user message logs.
dominotw an hour ago
i am tired of listening about other ppls agent setups. Everyone thinks they've discovered something cool and unique but They are all the same.
Its like telling other ppl about your dreams. Not interesting.
acedTrex an hour ago
For real, my eyes completely glaze over, there is nothing interesting in it.
dylanhouli 2 hours ago
Here I am still unable to stop myself from doing line-by-line code review. I notice too many things (redundant code, duplicate code, overly complex architecture, etc.) by doing it that I feel it would be careless not to.
stillpointlab 2 hours ago
My advice is to start a totally vibe coded side project. You will never gain confidence until you experiment, find the failure cases, learn to deal with them, etc.
Choose something you want to do but don't really care that much about. Be more ambitious than you think you could be, have a high bar on the outcome but purposefully choose to completely ignore the actual code. Make it write tests, dashboards, monitoring - whatever you need other than code to feel confident.
Now is the cheapest time it will ever be to experiment.
troupo 2 hours ago
[flagged]
dang 2 hours ago
stillpointlab 2 hours ago
BobbyJo 2 hours ago
benoau 2 hours ago
This is why I like GitHub Copilot's autocompletion, I'm right there guiding and policing the code as it appears.
g-b-r 2 hours ago
You're unable to stop being responsible? Tragic!
spiderice an hour ago
Is it responsible to move slowly when your competitors are moving quickly? Depends on how your competitors perform. If they perform well, then your "responsibility" suddenly becomes your extinction.
tripleee an hour ago
g-b-r an hour ago
dyauspitr 2 hours ago
No one cares about good code. It’s a means to an end. Your code doesn’t need to look pretty or be well documented or any of that stuff anymore because people are not looking at it. The only thing people care about is performant and error free code.
tripleee 2 hours ago
People saying this are telling on themselves that they have no idea what quality code is. It's not about looking pretty or nice variable names.
Code quality matters to AI just as much as it did to people
bbctr1 2 hours ago
gwynforthewyn 2 hours ago
Literally 50 years of engineering history and culture cares about whether code is good. There are libraries worth of books about it, not as a means to an app but for its own beauty. Just read “The Elements of Programming Style”, for example.
Do what you want, write apps with AI and don’t review code, it doesn’t impact me. The claim that no one cares about good code is demonstrably false, and that’s all I’m objecting to.
g-b-r 2 hours ago
nerdo 2 hours ago
Not true, LLM’s will struggle with badly organized and designed large codebases just the same, though likely with less errors and profanities.
copperx 2 hours ago
weakfish an hour ago
> No one cares about good code. It’s a means to an end.
I do, my coworkers do, my friends do, etc etc.
swat535 6 minutes ago
g-b-r 2 hours ago
Good code is a means to the end of the code being error (and vulnerability) free, maintainable and performant.
And if people are not looking it, those people don't care about their customers.
drewg123 2 hours ago
The way you phrase it makes me realize its almost like a GPL contamination. Eg, once you pull in GPL code, your project is infected and can never use a BSD (or other GPL incompatible) license.
Similarly, once you pull in terrible AI slop code, the project becomes unmaintainable by humans and you need to maintain it with AI.
gwynforthewyn an hour ago
troupo 2 hours ago
Code that isn't duplicated in 15 places, that doesn't read the whole database to fetch just 1 record, that doesn't do 15 database reads where one would suffice, that uses an optimized algorithm instead of an exponential one recreated badly from scratch... all that is also good code, and is just as important in LLM-slop era.
ativzzz 2 hours ago
It looks like they are specifically optimizing for incidents/reverts and shipping faster
> The goal hasn't changed: less human time per change, and no more reverts than before.
Is this Goodhart's law in action? Less reverts and less incidents was measured and became the target. Is this then still a good measure? I guess Revenue is a more direct measure, but we don't have access to that one.
enraged_camel an hour ago
From my perspective as a power user, the product has improved substantially over the past six months. It has gained new features that are actually useful, lots of UI/UX/perf improvements, and bug fixes as well.
New features have actually been remarkable. For me they are almost always in one of two categories: things I've always wanted (but never actually bothered communicating to the devs), and things I didn't know I needed but did. The product team is clearly very tuned in.
All in all, I'd say their approach is working.
typesanitizer 2 hours ago
FWIW, Pangram identifies several sections as 100% AI-written.
stymaar 2 hours ago
Poorly I'm afraid, given how many new bugs make their way to the claude code CLI every update.
rileymichael 2 hours ago
what are people using for automated code review these days? the claude code review product originally mentioned it cost "$15-25 per review" (which is absurd), but it seems like they've removed that from their docs with the launch yesterday. we've looked at various products in the space (coderabbit, greptile, etc.) but have gripes with each.
honestly i'm thinking it might be easier (and cheaper) to launch our own agent from GH webhooks and trigger `/code-review`..
NorthSouthNorth 3 minutes ago
We've had great success with a custom gh action on a self hosted runner. It sets up codex and all the same stuff a dev has on their machine:
So dbs, seed files, etc, and then just a review prompt and some skills and a few scripts.
It triggers on a new published PR or if tagged @bot-name. It's way better than the other services we've tried (which was admittedly ages ago) because you can get it to work exactly how you want it and it's dead simple.
With Codex, for the time being at least, you can use a subscription, so it's basically free if you're already paying for one. But on API pricing it's still not too bad as it doesn't produce that much output.
I set this all up in about half a day. Codex does 99% of the heavy lifting.
walthamstow an hour ago
Using a different lab's model to review the code to the one that wrote it. Claude model plans/codes, OpenAI model reviews, or vice versa, or DeepSeek or GLM or whatever.
warkdarrior 2 hours ago
> the claude code review product originally mentioned it cost "$15-25 per review" (which is absurd)
If an engineer paid $150,000 a year reviews some code manually for about 30 minutes, the cost of their time is about $36.
rileymichael an hour ago
in a vacuum, sure. the average pull request will have multiple commits once opened (i.e. to address feedback or perhaps it was opened too early), each triggering a review. it's very easy to rack up $100+ per pr (and an eng may open a dozen prs in a single day)
gonzalohm 2 hours ago
That explains why the UI keeps changing.
How is this a proper product? Every time you open the desktop app the buttons may be on a completely random place
enraged_camel an hour ago
The UI has improved substantially over the past six months. New capabilities are prominently featured and less-used ones are de-emphasized or removed. Every product goes through this type of evolution. The difference with Claude Code is that at the speed they iterate, it happens a lot faster and is therefore more noticeable.
gonzalohm 6 minutes ago
You can call it however you want, but in the end it is just poor engineering. Imaging building a bridge that needs construction every week
crooked-v 3 hours ago
Well, that explains the Github repo with 5000 issues, maybe about a third of which are random regressions of previous behavior.
AlexErrant 2 hours ago
I just learned that manually invoked skills MUST be the _first_ thing in the prompt, e.g. you can't have `disable-model-invocation: true` and say "Hi, /grill-me on X".
Worse, everything after the /grill-me is injected a second time into the prompt as a <command-args> so your prompt is literally added to the context TWICE. (first time in the original user prompt.)
I swear Anthropic is intentionally bloating your context so you burn tokens on useless bullshit like this.
svachalek 2 hours ago
Oh /loop was the crowning achievement. Basically guarantees you'll run a prompt at max context without caching over and over.
layman51 2 hours ago
I was running into something similar where I had it working on a single Python file. Maybe part of the issue is that I had memory turned off, and the conversation might have spilled into two conversations. I wasn't using version control either, but since it was a single file with about 1000 lines of code, it didn't seem too hard to eventually get all of my features back.
devin 2 hours ago
I snorted laughing at this. "We are experiencing tremendous growth" and it's just a codebase with 1,000 agents endlessly adding markdown documentation for every 1 line change.
thisisauserid 2 hours ago
Remind me to invest more in the clouds they are burning those tokens in.
corentin88 an hour ago
Claude Code is great, but do you really push that much (new) code every day?
mixtureoftakes 2 hours ago
30 thousand changes merged per day? no. like just no. what are we doing? I'm trying to understand
devin 2 hours ago
There was a post some months back called "Lines of Code Got a Better Publicist" or something along those lines. This is just more of that. I am not impressed by 30 thousand "changes" per day in the slightest without significant added context. When I logged in and prompted Claude today, do I feel like I got +600,000 change value from when I logged in a month ago?
grey-area an hour ago
I’m horrified by it. There is no possible justification for it but it does explain their buggy products.
JamesSwift an hour ago
lol right? So youre telling me they shipping 150,000 features this week? Or, maybe, they whack-a-moled 149,995 perf or bug regressions and shipping 5 new things. :shrug:
JackSlateur 2 hours ago
I, too, can write and merge 30000 changes per day. Even 300000 if I've up to.
Of course, just like "line of code" is a worthless metric, "change merge per day" is;
for i in {1..10000000}
do
echo "I am working !" >> README.md
git add README.md
git commit -s -m "feat: working with AI"
done
(automerged PR, JOB IS DONE)aacid 2 hours ago
The premise is clear, is one agent can do what developer can, but quicker, why not speed up the whole workflow to match it?
ActionHank 2 hours ago
Have you used Claude Code?
Have you seen the benefit of the churn of 1000 PRs a day?
leoqa 2 hours ago
_verandaguy 2 hours ago
Right, but why do things this fast to begin with, especially for a product that's already publicly available?
I don't want to use a product that shifts under me as I use it several times a day. I want a product that actually moves slowly and works very reliably.
As an end user: why would I care about how many hundreds of releases a month are being pushed if maybe 1% of them have features I care about?
Speed is not the product.
sp4cec0wb0y 2 hours ago
More code output isn't a metric of success per se. Goodhart's law.
Andrex 2 hours ago
Humans don't operate at AI speeds. We're making the car go from 0 to 5000 mph in 1 second and the drivers are turning to goo in the seat.
nakul_ 2 hours ago
I wonder how they maintain the quality of tests for such a massive codebase and frequent commits.
owebmaster 2 hours ago
That's the trick: they don't
luisgvv 2 hours ago
And yet they can't fix the janky bugs when you scroll or show/hide chain of though, commands executed, configuring plug-ins from the options menu etc.
foolfoolz an hour ago
everything is shipped with auto reviews behind a flag. then you need a human approver to launch
good model
kettlez an hour ago
If the entire body of this article isn't just an "LGTM" then I know they're lying.
jstummbillig 2 hours ago
That's a shockingly low number.
t-writescode 2 hours ago
1000/day in what sounds like a single repo is a low number?
jstummbillig 2 hours ago
I am not sure what it is you are saying. What I am saying: I would have supposed that Claude writes 99.x% of Claude's Code code, and that ~no code at Anthropic is written by humans anymore.
sandeepkd 2 hours ago
ActionHank 2 hours ago
to achieve what?
Honestly not sure that there are that many effective changes a day given how little complexity there is to their public facing product.
oofbey 2 hours ago
No. 90% sounds like a low number. That implies something else is writing 10% of the code? People? Other models? What on earth is writing that other 10%?
JackSlateur 2 hours ago
90% ?
A random twitter said that, 6 month ago, it was 100% !
DECLINE ! SELL THE STOCK OPTIONS ! (wait, there are none, confused!)
surgical_fire an hour ago
Anthropic's solution to anything is to simply burn more tokens. Because of course.
Anyway, flagging as misinformation.
ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago
Title is: How the Claude Code team does code review