Be the first human to review your own code

Writing code with an AI is a private conversation right up until you open a pull request. You know what you asked for, what you tried, and why the code ended up this way. The person reviewing it doesn’t have that conversation in their head.

Before asking them to review the change or decide whether it should be merged, be the first human to read it properly yourself. An AI can help review it, but you’re the author. You need to understand what you’re handing over.

Producing got cheap and reading never did.

Before asking for review

• Write the rules down instead of hand-fixing them. A good chunk of my CLAUDE.md is this. Never write WHAT comments. One line max on a docstring. Keep comments that explain something the code alone doesn’t tell you. Explain why you made the change in the commit message. I wrote these rules after correcting the same problems repeatedly.

• Automate the cleanup pass. A comment-cleanup skill runs over the diff before I commit, deleting comments that repeat the code and keeping useful explanations to a few lines as needed.

• Read your own diff. All of it. (That this needs saying out loud in 2026 tells you where we are.) Line by line, the way you’d read a stranger’s code. The leftover debug log and the helper called exactly once are cheap for you to catch and expensive for a reviewer, because you have the context and they don’t.

• Use AI review to help with your own review. It can catch things you missed. Read its findings, check the changes, and make sure you understand them before asking someone else to approve the PR.

What this does to the reviewer

People adapt to what you send them. Once someone works out that your PRs are unread model output, they either slow down and audit every line, or they stop reading properly and approve on faith. You caused both and you don’t get to pick which one you get.

The first human to review your changes should be you. Don’t make someone else start from scratch on work you already have the context for.

None of this is really about AI. Unread diffs existed long before it. Models just made it fast to produce a lot of code you haven’t thought about.

Your reviewer will notice which side you’re on long before they say anything about it.

Taking the time

Read your changes and fix the problems you find before asking someone else to review them.