Code review's real job is catching hard-to-maintain code, not bugs
This is an argument against a common misconception about . The point being made is that 's purpose is not for the reviewer to find bugs or to guarantee bug-free code — finding bugs simply by reading code is generally not possible, and relying on review for that is misguided.
Instead, the primary purpose of is to catch code that will be hard to . When a reviewer reads the code and tries to understand what it does and how, and fails to understand it, that's a signal the code will be difficult to later — and it should be fixed now, while the original author still remembers how it works.
Key points
- 's purpose is to check , not to catch bugs
- It assumes finding bugs by reading code alone is generally not possible
- If the reviewer can't understand the code, that itself signals a problem
- The fix should happen now, while the original author still knows the code well