It's a human transcriber

Ah, that's too boring. I have a range of responses to pick from to keep things interesting:

• LGTM
• Nice
• Looks good
• Thanks
• Looks great
• :thumbsup:
• Looks good to me
• :shipit:

For me, no text means "I haven't really reviewed this properly so don't want to write anything that could be used against me if (when?) this breaks something in prod"

If you're in a place with codebase analytics you want to have at least one comment on every MR - otherwise the system will start to think you're falling behind... I hate codebase analytics.

In my experience, the managers get confused when issues/PRs are closed without any comment.
Useless comments beat having them pop into your slack to ask "hey, did you review this?" with a link to an approved PR.

How do you improve on this?

1 bigger PRs, but with multiple smaller commits, so reviews can review by commits?

yeah, fair point. it really only works with standard boilerplate code which is simple enough to not have any issue I guess.. in my case working with a NX monorepo, that would be any code created using the generators

Playing the blame game, especially publicly, is a bad way to encourage psychological safety in a community. See Linus Torvalds for examples (he has recently become a bit softer with his feedback).

A better option is to make clear expectations of what a good PR looks like. Then if expectations are not met, you can give 1 on 1 feedback. Don't just blast a noob in public or you can leave emotional scars.

Depends on what you classify as “minor change”. When I took up my first professional project, I found a plethora of little things to improve which would make users happy. That was very satisfying.

On the other hand, writing yet another module that displays a list of Foos, lets the user create a Foo, show the details of Foo, update it, and delete a Foo, becomes dull quickly, despite being a “new feature”.

I have worked on non-trivial (aka took 10-12 people over a year to even deliver an alpha) greenfield projects, where I literally made the first check-in into the repo.

The only 500+ line PRs I raised was auto generated boilerplate code, or renaming something.

I don't understand the optimism of devs who spend weeks writing code without bothering to test anything they've written. Unless you're writing utterly trivial BS, how does one have this level of confidence in their code? And if you did bother to stop and test, why on god's green earth would you not raise a PR? Why wait till you have thousands of lines of code before asking for feedback?

Saaaame, pretty frequently on my team actually

FYI: OP is talking about a different kind of line than code