In my experience five 100-line diffs get reviewed much faster than one 500-line diff.
Especially when you follow best practices like splitting refactors from functional work; the canonical stacked diff for me is “refactor to make the upcoming change easy; add some tests for the existing functionality I want to protect; small diff to actually make the change”.
1 & 2 don’t generally require caffeine to review. 3 probably requires engaging the brain. If you put everything together you need to be on high alert for the whole review.
Especially when you follow best practices like splitting refactors from functional work; the canonical stacked diff for me is “refactor to make the upcoming change easy; add some tests for the existing functionality I want to protect; small diff to actually make the change”.
1 & 2 don’t generally require caffeine to review. 3 probably requires engaging the brain. If you put everything together you need to be on high alert for the whole review.