Spreading knowledge and context sharing are exactly why I like code reviews. It should also be something done by more than one person so that information is better disseminated throughout the team.
I find most bad codebases exist because of a culture that isn’t focused on quality, and I’m not talking about bug counts or code coverage. Clean codebases stay clean by being proactive about keeping them clean. This should include meticulous peer reviews, establishing design patterns, enforcing best practices, and taking initiative to leave things better than you found them (we used to call that boy scouting).
If your teams PR comments only contain LGTM, and the average time spent reviewing them is 5 minutes, your team isn’t focused on quality. If a PR contains more files than an average person can keep in their mental context window, it won’t get the attention it needs to be properly reviewed. If there is no accountability to keep a clean codebase, you’ll end up with 2 hours of work taking 5 days to complete.
My team of engineers and I were laid off on January 2, after spending a year replatforming a medical SaaS product. We were told the company was heading in another direction in order to to go to market faster.
That direction is the Product Designer and Claude Code, rebuilding everything from scratch.
If your team is only focused on tabs/spaces or soapboxing during code reviews, you have bigger issues to take care of.