The unbearable vagueness of "LGTM"

A short note that ought to be longer, on a thing I keep noticing.

The shorthand is faster than thinking, which is the entire problem with it — and also the reason it persists. In a normal week our team ships somewhere between forty and seventy pull requests, and a healthy fraction of them get rubber-stamped with “LGTM” within minutes of being opened.

The cost is invisible until it isn’t. A reviewer who blesses without reading is performing a social ritual, not a technical one — and the ritual still consumes a slot of the author’s mental model that they could have spent on something else.

(More to come.)