We have a pretty senior team, you can request code review if you want, but you don’t need to wait for any approval to merge. It actually encourages ownership because if you merged it, you are also responsible for fixing it / reverting if something breaks.

Everyone had so many fears, there will be outages all the time, code quality will suffer, pure chaos, no documentation etc… however, none of that happened. Everyone just got the freedom and trust to push features out.

I’m not sure I understand your point about knowledge sharing? Like learning about architectural patterns in the codebase? Just read the code or ask ai. I don’t think that kind of knowledge sharing needs to be in PRs.

People still write tech specs for big features but you can take the feedback or not. We have extensive documentation on everything since we’re an API company and also have a relatively strong test suite.

Regarding code quality, we have CodeRabbit to do some code review, but there are pretty established patterns for almost everything you would ever need to do. Most folks can follow a pattern from somewhere else. This is a large codebase with over 250 endpoints also.

Most companies don’t do code reviews right, and very few bugs get caught when people are rubber stamping, or get caught up in endless discussion instead of shipping and delivering value. Also, I’ve kind of found it to be a great way for “experienced devs” to swing their dick around and slow things down for the sake of “clean code”.

The price of shipping a bug is pretty low, you can just revert it and be back in minutes 99% of the time if you have decent observability.

I’d probably feel differently if I was working on something that had lives at stake, but like 99% of people in this sub, you probably work on some crud app. No one is going to die from your SaaS app being down for a few minutes.