Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to work from, and that's just the cost of doing business.
That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.
> In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread
Respectfully, in a high-trust environment, feedback should be delivered well before the PR stage. If you've let someone write a whole bunch of code without having a shared understanding of how the solution should work, you may have earlier process issues that PRs are papering over
You cannot deliver feedback on something that doesn't exist. If you mean a review in the style of "all of this is wrong and needs to be rewritten differently" then yes, that's something to be discussed beforehand. But I don't imagine this is what people think of when discussing a review.
Depends on how PRs function within teams. For some, the PR is a lightweight thing that is the preferred method of communication. It sounds like you are imagining a case where face to face communication, or communication over chat, is preferred for early stages, with the PR being a nearly final artifact. But it doesn't have to work like that.
I think that's a valuable point. Especially as LLMs bring the cost of prototyping down (and reduce emotional investment in code written), it may be more viable to use PRs as proposals/sketches of a solution.
With human reviewers, I find that by the time someone has churned out enough of a solution to post a PR, they are already quite invested in specifics of the solution, and it makes it emotionally costly (to both author and reviewer) when someone says "hey, I'm not a fan of this whole approach, lets start over and do it this other way"
I have seen many a PR where it is obvious it is an exploratory work: eg. figuring out how to use an external dependency that is imperfectly or incorrectly documented, etc. (You can claim this should be done ahead of time, but experience tells me you need to code it to learn it)
The emotional toll there is real, but this is exactly the moment when you expose the knowledge of that external dependency to the unbiased party that is the reviewer.
I like combining approvals to satisfy the urge for completion and closure, with a request for fast-follow refactor to better match the newly discovered model of interaction. (The worst code review experience I have seen is when a reviewer accepts it as-is and does a fast follow refactor themselves, depriving the author of the opportunity to learn and remain an expert in that area)
A discussion ahead of the implementation can also bias the two parties to that discussion and have them overlook the same implementation issue: many things you only understand once you start implementing.
If you have these parties review each other's code, I agree that rarely brings much value.
I think the best way to understand our experience with reviews is to stop and say: in a few sentences, what do you expect out of a quality code review? (sounds like nothing in your case, but I am curious)
Agreed. But those things are not mutually exclusive.
Agree. All the subtleties of how a high trust environment work are hard to enumerate
Depends on the change. Certainly most PRs don't need feedback before the PR is ready - the task is too obvious, and there's little to feed back on before there's any code.
For bigger changes, of course you need feedback on designs. But that could easily be in the form of draft PRs.
I definitely would push back on anything that required feedback before PRs. That's way too much process. Just going to slow you down for no benefit.