Why should code be reviewed before it is committed and pushed?

Why should code be reviewed before it is committed and pushed?

Reviewing code before committing and pushing helps ensure that the shared change matches its intended purpose. AI-generated code can look complete while missing a requirement, carrying accidental edits, or implementing a success path that fails under ordinary user behavior.

Review the behavior being introduced

For a wedding dashboard, compare the increment with its acceptance criteria. Can the organizer edit only their own event? Does a failed request leave the form recoverable? Does the updated value remain correct after reloading?

Inspect the changes together with relevant surrounding code. The useful question is whether the application behaves correctly after the change, not whether each new line looks plausible on its own. Automated checks provide evidence, but their passing result does not establish untested behavior.

Inspect the proposed commit as a whole

Confirm that the commit contains the intended feature and its supporting files. Remove accidental debug output, unrelated formatting churn, or sensitive configuration from the proposed change before sharing it.

A commit is also a communication artifact. Keeping it focused helps a teammate understand why the change exists and helps future developers identify which behavior a particular revision introduced. If unrelated fixes are required, explain their connection or separate them into coherent changes.

Match the review effort to the risk

An authentication change deserves deeper scrutiny than a small text adjustment. Review session boundaries, data ownership, and error behavior when the feature touches private wedding information. For visual changes, browser inspection may be the most useful evidence.

Local checkpoint commits can still be part of an individual workflow; review should happen before changes are treated as ready for others or production. Team pull-request review can add another perspective afterward.

When a review discovers a defect, fix it and verify the affected path. Do not treat the existence of a review comment as evidence that the problem has been resolved.