November 26, 2025
Panel by panel panic
Comic Code Reviews
Dev turns code reviews into cartoons—helpful or hype
TLDR: Jon Aquino proposes turning code review summaries into comic strips using AI, demoed on a famous React change. The crowd is split: some say visuals and humor help reviewers understand faster, others warn it’s confusing and encourages lazy approvals—raising a big question about clarity versus cuteness in software teamwork.
If your code review looks like hieroglyphics, engineer Jon Aquino has a new trick: turn it into a comic. In a short post on his blog, he shows how to paste a prompt into AI coding tools and then into Google’s image maker to get a comic-strip summary of a change. The demo uses the famous React PR #13968, where “hooks” first arrived. The goal: make reviewers see what’s happening, fast, with characters and speech bubbles. For non-tech readers: a “code review” is when teammates check your work, and a “pull request” (PR) is the ticket you submit to merge changes.
The comments lit up. Jon says he’s testing comics to “help reviewers grasp intent quickly.” Supporters cheered the idea, with joshdavham arguing visuals and a conversational tone could make tough changes click, especially with a dash of humor. But the skeptics brought fireworks: antonvs warned the cartoons might promote “rubber-stamping” by people who can’t actually judge the code, while namanyayg blasted the example as confusing and likely to mislead beginners. qwertytyyuu waved in with a breezy “looks fun.” Meanwhile, onlookers joked about “Saturday morning PRs” and “linting with punchlines,” praising anything that makes dry reviews less painful—so long as clarity doesn’t get lost.
Key Points
- •The post proposes transforming pull requests into comic strips to aid code reviewers.
- •It outlines a two-step workflow using Claude Code or Cursor for planning and Gemini for image generation.
- •A specific example references React’s PR #13968, the initial implementation of React Hooks.
- •Images show the comic-strip output generated by Gemini from the AI-drafted plan.
- •The article provides exact prompts to use with the tools to replicate the process.