What Types of Code Review Comments Do Developers Most Frequently Resolve?
Abstract
Large language model (LLM)-powered code review automation tools have been introduced to generate code review comments. However, not all generated comments will drive code changes. Understanding what types of generated review comments are likely to trigger code changes is crucial for identifying those that are actionable. In this paper, we set out to investigate (1) the types of review comments written by humans and LLMs, and (2) the types of generated comments that are most frequently resolved by developers. To do so, we developed an LLM-as-a-Judge to automatically classify review comments based on our own taxonomy of five categories. Our empirical study confirms that (1) the LLM reviewer and human reviewers exhibit distinct strengths and weaknesses depending on the project context, and (2) readability, bugs, and maintainability-related comments had higher resolution rates than those focused on code design. These results suggest that a substantial proportion of LLM-generated comments are actionable and can be resolved by developers. Our work highlights the complementarity between LLM and human reviewers and offers suggestions to improve the practical effectiveness of LLM-powered code review tools.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Goldman-al:ASE25,
author = {Saul Goldman and
Hong Yi Lin and
Jirat Pasuksmit and
Patanamon Thongtanunam and
Chakkrit Kla Tantithamthavorn and
Zhe Wang and
Ray Zhang and
Ali Behnaz and
Fan Jiang and
Michael Siers and
Ryan Jiang and
Mike Buller and
Minwoo Jeong and
Ming Wu},
title = {What Types of Code Review Comments Do Developers Most Frequently Resolve?},
booktitle = {ASE},
pages = {3760--3765},
publisher = {{IEEE}},
year = {2025},
}