Second Brain

Automate Your Code Reviews: The Lint Rule Spreadsheet

The Story

Boris had a simple system for finding what to automate. Every time he did a code review (checking other engineers’ work), if he commented about a particular kind of issue, maybe a stylistic problem or a common mistake, he added a tally to a spreadsheet. He linked the specific code review so he could find the pattern later.

When the same kind of comment appeared more than a few times, he wrote a “lint rule” (an automated check) that would catch the issue automatically. No more human review needed for that pattern.

Over time, he automated most of his code reviews. He had “a flock of lint rules” doing the repetitive work for him.

Boris frames this as the engineer’s superpower: “How can I do less of my work? As an engineer, our superpower is automation. The most tedious stuff you can automate. It’s free leverage.”

He also applied this principle at scale: every side project he spun up was born from a problem he hit repeatedly in his daily coding. If he hit the same problem two or three times, he looked around to see if other people were hitting it too. If they were, it became a project.

Lesson for Creators

Track your repetitive work. If you find yourself giving the same feedback, answering the same question, or doing the same manual task more than a few times, that’s a signal to automate or systematize it. Build a template. Create an FAQ. Write a standard operating procedure. The time investment pays for itself quickly, and it compounds. Boris’s phrase: “It’s free leverage.”

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