Topic
Using pull request review checklists and gates to enforce engineering standards before merge rather than after failure.
On PR #149, Codex filed 68 comments across 10 rounds and the team fixed 62 of them, all correct. The write-up blames the house rule that turned every comment into a commit for the code that came out worse.
Reality
A team pushing 70 to 100 pull requests a week reports a 30 to 40 percent first-pass catch rate across 4,200 PRs. The parts that travel are the file-level chunk boundary and the draft gate; the percentage stays with the stack.
Reality
Code review has always been sampling, and the signals it sampled stood in for a mind that had read the code. A dev.to post argues that when diffs arrive without one, what needs rewriting is the process, not the effort.
Reality
Canvas arc() wants radians while CSS transform wants degrees, and the mismatch never raises an exception, so a dev.to checklist puts the catch in the diff and the lint config instead of in each bug fix.
Reality
A 90-day instrumented study reports 28% more pull requests and 13 points of test coverage, but the gain lands only after training and workflow embedding, which puts the money on enablement rather than seats.
Reality
Bacchelli and Bird classified 570 review comments inside Microsoft: 14 percent were about defects, 29 percent about improving code. Most review scoreboards still count bugs.
Reality
A practitioner argues the 80% coverage norm was a budget for review time, not a standard, and that any check living only in the pipeline reports to you rather than constraining the agent.
Reality
A published Playwright and Cucumber review checklist puts flakiness at the merge rather than the runner: state isolation, synchronisation strategy and single-behaviour scoping.
Reality