Discussion: the primary purpose of code review

Category: Pulse
Status: discussion
Sources: primary post, HN discussion
Summary: A post arguing that the main value of code review is catching code that will be hard to maintain, rather than finding bugs, drew a large HN thread (334 points).
Comments: Commenters split on the premise. Some report finding plenty of bugs in review and argue architecture should already be settled in design before a pull request; others agree the durable payoff is steering away from patterns that get copied into future code, and one framed review cynically as gatekeeping hierarchy.