X Discussion: Grok Bot Engineer poteto Calls Adversarial Agent Code Reviews "Mostly a Waste of Tokens" and Argues for Empirical Plus Formal Verification Instead
On November 3, @poteto (lauren), whose bio says she works on Grok @bot at SpaceXSI, is on the React Compiler core team, and previously worked at Cursor, Meta and Netflix, posted what she called "maybe a hot take": she now considers adversarial reviews mostly a waste of tokens and thinks those tokens are far better spent on empirical combined with formal verification. She says she has updated her agent skill pack pstack to use its interrogate (multi-model adversarial review) skill less and may eventually remove it. She adds that she has found very little value in code review in the abstract, because agents tend to get lost in nitpicks and YAGNIs. The post drew about 906K views, 9,227 likes and 5,538 bookmarks. It is a personal opinion that sparked debate over the value of AI code review.
Key Takeaways
- Opinion (personal, not an official finding): adversarial reviews are "mostly a waste of tokens"; empirical plus formal verification is the better use of them
- Action: the author says she has made pstack use the interrogate skill less and may remove it; at fetch time the public pstack folder in GitHub cursor/plugins had no commits after October 27, so the change is not visible there yet
- What interrogate is: per its public SKILL.md, it spawns one read-only reviewer per configured model (defaults Claude Opus 5.5 xhigh and Grok 4.7 xhigh fast) to attack the diff, then sorts findings into Act on, Consider, Noted and Dismissed without auto-applying fixes
- Author (per her X and GitHub bios): engineer on Grok Bot at SpaceXSI, React Compiler core team, previously at Cursor, Meta and Netflix
- Reach: about 906K views, 9,227 likes, 5,538 bookmarks, 668 replies, 356 reposts and 210 quotes
