I've been thinking about a problem with AI code review that I don't see discussed enough: a reviewer can be technically correct and still make the whole review experience worse.
Here's the PR that made this click for me. Small change, maybe 200 lines, nothing exotic. New validation path, a couple helper functions. The kind of thing that used to get a comment or two and an approve.
The AI reviewer came back with something like a dozen comments. A naming suggestion. A "this null check might be redundant" note. A theoretical race condition that would only show up under conditions the code was never going to hit in prod. A "you could extract this into a function" suggestion on a function that was already about ten lines long.
And here's the annoying part most of these weren't wrong. The variable name genuinely could've been clearer. The null check probably was redundant. Individually, I could defend almost every comment on that list.
But there was one comment in there about an actual edge case in the validation logic that genuinely mattered. And it was sitting in the middle of eleven other comments that didn't. The dev opening the PR skimmed most of it, dismissed a few without really reading them, and nearly skipped the important one too — because by comment seven or eight, he'd already stopped expecting any of it to be worth his time.
