Comment by jmkr

There's some idiom that says something like "you don't understand something if you can't explain it." I think this is the real point of code review. To make a case for why your code is valuable. If it's just a blob of 1000 lines of "refactor" or "adding feature." It means nothing. A good commit has some kind of abstract tailored to what work was done.

Then a review becomes something like "the claim was made this function does this, does it look like the function does what it says it does?" If you can understand it in context, then you've added trust and knowledge of how it works.

However it seems to often be the case a review turns into "I like this word better than that word" so back to the explaining it point, it becomes a bit of a self review with the hope it might be helpful to somebody else in the future.