I find nitpicks to not only be useless to the author, but to actively add noise that either masks any real issues you want noted or just give the author meaningless work. They seem more like a tonic for the reviewer to be able to say something to indicate they did look at the code and just result in wasted time.
It depends on the nitpick. If it's something like a spelling error, then that's worth fixing.
If it's formatting or something that can be linted, then that should be automated.
If it's code style, I generally let that slide if it's just a difference in opinion, or I'll try to have a discussion with my coworker about our preferences (though I would still approve the PR). If it's genuinely bad code or a junior dev then it makes sense to provide feedback.
> If it's something like a spelling error, then that's worth fixing.
My take on this is that if it's worth fixing it's not a nitpick. Small problems are still problems.
Automated stuff, if not automated, is also an issue that should be fixed.
Teaching opportunities are also not nitpicks, as teaching is important.
For me the acid test for a nitpick is that if I wouldn't add a commit just to fix it, it is not worth a comment. I'd add a commit to fix a spelling error, but not to tweak some variable name. This is assuming a real commit and not something you're planning on rebasing away.
If you define "nitpick" as "something that's not worth fixing" then by definition nitpicks are worthless.
I've heard the term nitpick usually used to mean "small comment", "my preference", or "very minor".
> Teaching opportunities are also not nitpicks, as teaching is important.
Preference usually isn't a teaching opportunity, it's just a minor disagreement. It's trying to make your code look like I (the reviewer) wrote it. For example maybe you like more terse names than I do. We can argue about every point of personal preference, but that's not a great use of our time.
> If you define "nitpick" as "something that's not worth fixing" then by definition nitpicks are worthless.
> I've heard the term nitpick usually used to mean "small comment", "my preference", or "very minor".
Those are all things that are not worth fixing/changing and so that is just a different way of restating it. I.E. "small comments", "my preference", "very minor" things are all worthless in a PR. They might be interesting when hanging out and chatting, but for a productive workflow they are just noise.
Same with preferences... if you are just relying a preference, not worth it. If you are teaching a better idiom or similar, then it might be. This is not hard and fast, just that in general most "nitpick" types of PR comments are a net loss.
Nitpicks are explicitly declared as such and since everyone participating the PR know that they aren't meant to be blocking at all and are encouraged to ignore them if they take too much time than they are worth.
