Code review is where a lot of engineering time silently disappears. You open a PR, context-switch from whatever you were doing, try to hold the whole diff in your head, and write comments that are either too vague to be useful or so detailed they take 20 minutes to type. AI can compress a big chunk of that — but only if you're deliberate about how you use it. Here's the exact workflow I follow before and during code reviews, with the prompts I actually copy-paste. Step 1: Dump the diff into context Before touching anything else, I pull the raw diff and paste it into my AI tool of choice (I use a mix of Claude and GPT-4o depending on context length). Don't summarize it yourself first. Give it the raw diff and let the model build its own mental model. Summarizing before you prompt it biases the output toward your existing assumptions — which defeats half the point.…