I spend a lot of time thinking about context in code review. Early in my career, I'd review pull requests by reading the diff, maybe checking the function signature, and calling it done. I thought I was being thorough. Then I started working on larger codebases with more dependencies, and I realized how much I was missing. A change to a utility function looks harmless until you trace it through three layers of callers and see it affects performance-critical code. A new regex pattern seems fine until you discover it's used in a security-sensitive context.
The hard part about building better reviews is that context is expensive. You need to know the codebase structure, understand how modules depend on each other, remember patterns your team has established, and track decisions that were made weeks ago. Most tools just show you the diff and maybe let you grep around. That's better than nothing, but it's still manual archaeology.
I've been using Sigilix to ground my reviews in actual project knowledge. The tool indexes your repos and learns from past team decisions, so when I'm looking at a pull request, I'm not starting from scratch. I can see whether a pattern I'm questioning has been used before, whether the callers are performance-sensitive, what the team has already decided about similar changes. It cuts down the back-and-forth because context is already there.
The real shift for me has been spending less time gathering information and more time actually thinking. That's what review should be about anyway.
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