Stop Wasting Time on Nitpicks: Automating PR Reviews

Source: Dev.to

The Problem with Manual PR Reviews

We’ve all been there. You open a Pull Request that’s dozens of files deep, spend the next hour commenting on indentation, variable naming, and missing docstrings, and by the time you’re done you’re exhausted. That’s exactly when the real bugs slip through.

The silent performance killers—such as an O(n) operation inside a loop, an unconstrained file extraction that becomes a Zip Bomb, or a full database reload triggered by a single user action—are not style issues. They are architectural bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities that typical linter rules can’t catch.

Our team was spending 90 % of review time on things that didn’t matter and missing the 10 % that actually killed production. We needed a way to automate deep inspection—not just “is this line too long?” but “does this function call trigger a full table scan?”.

Introducing CodeProt

CodeProt was built to handle the noise so reviewers can focus on the logic. It uses AST and data‑flow analysis to understand what the code is doing, not just what it looks like.

What CodeProt Catches That Standard Linters Miss

Vulnerable File Extraction (Denial‑of‑Service)

In a recent AI project analysis, we found a file‑upload handler that extracted archives without checking size limits.

# Vulnerable code pattern
def extract_data(file):
    with zipfile.ZipFile(file) as zf:
        zf.extractall()  # No limit check!

A tiny 42 KB zip file can expand to petabytes, creating a classic Denial‑of‑Service vector. CodeProt flags this immediately, requiring a check on total_uncompressed_size before extraction.

Performance Killer: Full Reload on Every Update

We also caught a nasty pattern in a dependency‑tracking system. Every time a document count changed, the system triggered a full reload of the entire dataset.

// Performance killer
public void update() {
    // Reloads EVERYTHING on every update
    List allDocs = database.loadAll(); 
    // ...
}

This works fine with 10 documents but crashes the system with 10,000. CodeProt identifies these loadAll patterns in high‑frequency paths and suggests incremental updates instead.

Benefits

• Time Savings: No more wasting hours on nitpicks.
• Higher Confidence: If the PR is green, the basics are solid, allowing focus on design and business logic.
• Security & Performance: Early detection of hidden bottlenecks and vulnerabilities.

Get Started

If you’re tired of being a human linter, give CodeProt a try. It’s free for open‑source and individual developers. Let’s stop letting performance killers merge.