Mark Di Marco

Picking an AI Code Reviewer

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 19:27:50 GMT

We wanted to add an AI Code Review to our existing code review process, not to replace human reviewers.

It is primarily used as a first-pass code review for the developer that submitted the PR, but the comments made by tool can also start conversations between humans.

Our small engineering team of five did trials of four different AI-powered code review tools:

CodeRabbit
Cubic.dev
Cursor’s BugBot
Claude Code Review

We opted to do minimal customization of each.

TDLR - we’re going with Cubic.

Evaluations

Claude Code Review

The format of this was all wrong - one big comment on the PR, rather than in-line comments. The reviews were so “fluffy” with overly positive language and checklists, it was actually hard to get any signal from the noise. I did update the prompt to be more succinct in its responses but that didn’t move the bar much.

Each PR update triggered a new big comment, and it was in the way so we shut it off after a few days.

This was the cheapest solution, costing a few cents per review for us.

Cursor’s BugBot

Seemed tilted towards bugs and security. Overall the comments weren’t super helpful. It did have a nicer integration than Claude Code in that it did per-line comments, and even had a way to have a background agent fix the issue.

This was the most expensive solution at $40/user/month, twice the cost we pay for Cursor itself (we’re also moving away from Cursor but that had nothing to do with this review)

CodeRabbit

Line-by-line comments, caught real practical bugs and issues. You have to turn off a lot of the features immediately, like the poems and ASCII art - way too much cutesy stuff out of the box.

CodeRabbit also includes diagrams and visualizations for the changes, which were often just in the way, since our team is already familiar with the architecture of the codebase.

It generated a wall of text with each review, but it at least used Github’s collapsable markdown sections so that it wasn’t overly intrusive.

While it caught real issues, it also has a lot of “Nitpicks” and “Refactor Suggestions”, so we’d ignore 75% or more of the comments it made.

CodeRabbit has a lot of potential, and oddly enough I had only found out about it because of their billboard on I-35 in Austin.

Pricing-wise, $24/month/user if paid annually, $30 if paid monthly.

Cubic

A YC company, the newest one on the block. Less nit-picky than the rest, it caught some real issues. Cubic has line-by-line comments like CodeRabbit and Bugbot.

It was the least noisy of the bunch and most useful. The comments were succinct and to the point, and the PR summary that it writes was useful to. On some small PRs, the only comment was that it had no comments, which was nice in a UNIXy-philosophy-kind-of-way.

They do have their own review app, rather than using Github’s Pull Request review page, which had similar diagrams to CodeRabbit, but my team just didn’t find them useful.

We didn’t test the “Fix with Cubic” feature, but it looks like they have a way for a background agent to update the code.

Pricing-wise, $24/month/user if paid annually, $30 if paid monthly, same as CodeRabbit.

Conclusion

We’re going with Cubic at the end. After all of the trials ended last week, my team felt the void of not having any of these tools active and asked if we could get Cubic turned back on, so we upgraded to paid last month and we’ve been pretty happy since.

AI-assisted Programming and Where It Will Take Us

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:48:26 GMT

The Windsurf series of events last week was bizarre, but not surprising. I predict the next few years of AI-assisted software tooling will be crazy with a lot of product switching. Cursor’s dominance is not here to stay, for 3 reasons:

Developers rarely have loyalty to software that have to we pay for
Switching costs for these products are at an all-time-low
Venture Capital subsidies that we-the-consumer benefit from will end for one company as they start for another

We are currently beneficiaries of a classic VC-backed startup strategy - subsidize end-user costs with Venture Capital to gain market dominance and improve unit economics once enough market share is captured.

I just don’t think that strategy will work with extremely low switching costs and zero loyalty.

Cursor will clamp down usage and raise costs, and another vendor with a similar value-add will swoop in with a cool $40 million Series A check.

5 minute tasks help save my team's backlog

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 03:12:37 GMT

I reserve an hour of my workday for a series of 5 minute tasks - production changes that take less than 5 minutes to get out the door. These are never pull requests or releases of our API, mobile app, or web app - rather changes in our low-code Retool or CustomerIO deployments.

These 5 minute tasks means I’m not creating a ticket, collecting feedback, prioritizing, and managing it’s place in our development cycle. It also means the team asking for the change gets that change the same day they ask for it.

Retool

Buildforce is an operation and support heavy organization. Everyone in the organization uses our Retool deployment nearly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Retool is a constant source of frustration for me - my development team avoids it, it can be finicky when making changes, and I’m often running up against the limits of what a low-code UI can do - but all that said, it’s my favorite tool in our stack. It empowers me to make significant changes in less than 5 minutes. I would never go back to building and maintaining a from-scratch interface, and no CMS tool comes close to what I can do.

Retool sits on top of our GraphQL API, which is a major source of it’s power - with GraphQL the client can craft the response payload it wants, so no one has to go update a REST API to include extra data.

CustomerIO

CustomerIO is another source of frustration, and similar to Retool - my development team avoids it, it can be finicky when making changes, and I’m often running up against the limits of what the workflow builder can do.

However, also like Retool, it lets me make production changes to our communications engine, which is the life-blood of our labor marketplace. I can change an SMS to a Push notification, add a follow-up Push notification, and monitor open and click-thru rates in real time.

Vietnam Combat Map in 70 lines of code

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 02:49:31 GMT

A quick tutorial on generating an interactive map using data from combat missions during the Vietnam War

lt - a TUI client for Linear.app

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 03:05:33 GMT

I’ll be the first to admit that the intersection between the sets of people that prefer terminal UI (TUI) apps and use Linear.app for issue tracking is tiny. It has at least a population of 1 - me.

Seeing that finding product market fit should be a walk in the park, I wrote a [TUI client for Linear.app called lt (el-tee).

I needed an excuse to learn a new language, so I read the first half of the Rust book and then dove in. I turned off all AI features since this is a toy side project and I’m not being paid for speed of delivery.

lt can toggle between “My Issues” and any custom views you’ve saved in Linear’s desktop app.

Here are the highlights and lowlights from the development process:

Highlights

Rust + Neovim, with rust-analyzer, makes for a pretty solid development experience.

Rust is a lovely language. The pattern matching feels very natural, and the Option/Result types are lovely and simple.

Crates.io is nice and it was easy enough to find crates that I needed, like one for GraphQL and one for writing TUI apps.

I’ve heard horror stories of async Rust, and maybe my use of async was very isolated, but it wasn’t difficult to get async working.

Publishing an executable to be installable via Homebrew was simple (using a tap)

Lowlights

I find the generic and typical docs.rs Rust documentation to be difficult to parse and follow. At least the docs are uniform.

While I was able to find packages to do the heavy lifting, the main graphql package hasn’t been updated in years, and the TUI library called ratatui has a website that needs some love viz-a-viz information architecture.