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Incentives set up a race to the bottom.

I worked in an environment that was like Raycast and later adopted gatekeeping code reviews. If the code reviewer wasn't happy you couldn't merge. This gives the reviewer power to have the author shape the code the way the reviewer prefers at little cost to the reviewer. And of course the authors often respond by doing likewise when asked to review code. My approach as a reviewer was to provide feedback without blocking merges, but this alone is not enough to incentivize reciprocal behavior.

There was a guy at work who would always complain about numbers that weren't given names as #defines regardless of whether it made sense or not (Magic Numbers!). My co-worker asked him why he was so picky about it. Apparently because someone did that to him.



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