I'm in full agreement, a 6K line diff is too much for a human to review, and AI-only review isn't the answer. I've been fighting the "please break your changes into smaller pieces" uphill battle for two decades, and I think it's been hard partly because it's a lot of work to retroactively break up a change and it requires a different mentality when you're actually doing the coding work.
AIs aren't making that any easier for humans, between large diffs and larger influxes of changes and progressively less and less context forming in anyone's heads.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking and working on this problem lately. I do think there's a lot that can/needs to be done here for review and retaining institutional knowledge beyond just giving up and giving in to AIs. But, fighting fire with fire, I do think AI tooling (as part of a broader strategy and toolset) can help with this problem in a way that still keeps the human firmly in control and informed.
Our space is very saturated now, so I'm keeping some of what we're building for this close to the chest until we're ready to announce, but one thing you might consider is using AI to help you break things down locally so you can focus on smaller pieces at a time. Should help you see what's going on and fit more of it in your own head.
You can also try to start by having AI do a first pass and summarize at a higher level what the change is trying to do and where to start with your review process, what things you should know and remember and focus on and look out for, rather than just "please review this (so another AI can fix it)."
(Or wire up an agent to check for diff sizes and complexity and reply with helpful prompts the developer can add to their CLAUDE.md to better cap commits, every single time they do it... Let me know how that works out for you.)
I believe more code review tools need to let teams set limits on diff sizes, too. That's one of the things we offer, but increasingly something that companies turn off due to pressure from developers producing large diffs. It's at least a first stab at encouraging people to be mindful of diff sizes.
There's also a lot of good discussion in this thread. Things are messy right now and a lot of us are seeing the same problems, with very few really good solutions. I'm hoping I can bring some fresh approaches to the market (I really think there's a lot that a dedicated and well-integrated code review tool can do here, if it's wired in right.), but I also think our industry's going to be learning some hard lessons here soon about combining cognitive debt with "move even faster and break even more things".
https://lobste.rs/c/zvlsv6
