Comment by sanderjd

Why the scare quotes around "positive"? I have lots of positive thoughts when doing code reviews. I don't write them into comments all that often, but sometimes I do. "Oh I didn't know about this API, nice find!" "Ah, nice approach, this is a big improvement." "Thanks for improving the test coverage!" Maybe this seems like unactionable "noise", but it isn't, it encourages future actions of the kind being positively reinforced. Plus it's free, it takes no time to write and no time to read comments like this, all it does is make the author's experience of reading the review a bit more pleasant. This is all upside, no downside. It would be crazy to discourage such a thing.