How Does Modal Treat Code Reviews?

Erik Bernhardsson treats code review at Modal as optional. Required reviews often let people escape accountability for merging changes into production, so the real investment is continuous integration and continuous deployment.

Modal still does code reviews. When he writes code, he occasionally asks the authors whether a change lines up with how they think about the system, and he hopes he is not changing the architecture in a fundamental way. Reviews stay optional on purpose. A documentation edit or a basic change should not wait for a human, especially in the era of AI. An infrastructure company needs one more nine of uptime than the average startup. The systems need rate limits everywhere, decoupled pieces, no single point of failure, and extremely good test coverage. Coding agents are now quite good at writing tests. A few years ago he saw test writing as one of the major gaps, because a solid test means stepping back from the change and playing devil's advocate.