Get a second opinion before you ship
The person who wrote the code thinks the code is fine. Of course they do. A review by someone (or something) that didn't write it catches what the author missed.
You just finished building a feature. It works, the tests pass, everything looks good. But you've been staring at it for hours and you're seeing what you expect to see, not what's actually there. A code review is the fresh pair of eyes that catches what you missed.
Does this change match what we planned to build? Are there files that changed that shouldn't have? Did we accidentally break something that was working before? Is the code clear enough that someone else could understand it six months from now?
The review doesn't have to be long. Even a quick scan catches the kind of thing that causes problems later: a missing error check, a file that was changed by accident, a function that lost its safety logic during the rewrite.
After completing any significant piece of work, take a step back and review the changes yourself before calling it done. Look at every file that changed. Ask: was this change intentional? Does it match the plan? Would someone else understand why this changed?
If you're working with AI tools, the review step is even more important. AI assistants can make subtle changes you didn't ask for. The review is your safety net.
Single-line fixes where the change is obviously correct. Everything else benefits from a second look. Two minutes of review is cheaper than twenty minutes of debugging a regression.
Product leader shipping across enterprise SaaS, AI in production, and 0→1. Writing about what actually ships — not what sounds good in a deck.