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Our code reviews are far more "is this the right way to solve the problem?" than "hey, you never use that variable you declared." The latter would be picked up by our linter; I'm having a hard time seeing the value proposition here.

>It’s like having a distinguished engineer on call, 24x7

I don't believe that, regardless of how many times they sprinkle in the words "machine" and "learning".

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I'd be very surprised if the service they've announced is a linter.

The announcement says it can even analyze parts your code that are more computationally expensive than they need to be. I'm not sure I understand the skepticism--surely they have among the largest code repositories in the world. Why couldn't they train models on it to look at best practices and even compare code practices to different metrics.

Isn't this just calculating the cyclomatic complexity?

No - OP meant computationally expensive, not cognitively expensive. Two nested for-loops can be O(nˆ2) but can have a cyclomatic complexity as low as 1.

It may not be as good as a human, but I highly doubt it's a linter either. It's somewhere in between. If their claims are true, and it has been trained on hundreds of thousands of their own reviews, the AI could have picked up common patterns that are beyond lint but still real mistake a good reviewer would spot.

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