The Code Runs. That Is Not the Same as Being Able to Hand It Over

Is There Anyone Who Can Explain This Code

That is the first question in a handover. Not whether the screens work, but whether someone is still around who can say why it was built this way.

Code written by a person usually comes with someone who holds the answers. Ask why an exception is swallowed here, why this value is hardcoded, and you get a reply. Code produced quickly with AI often has an empty seat there. If a prompt produced something, it worked, and it stayed, then the person who shipped it cannot explain it either.

So the first review is a conversation, not a diff. What is this feature supposed to do, which cases were deliberately left out, what problems are already known. The fewer answers that come back, the longer the handover takes.

The Secrets Are Sitting in the Source

This is the failure you meet most often when inheriting an AI-built project. API keys, database passwords, payment provider secrets, written straight into the files. Example code tends to look that way, and a plan to move them into environment variables later has a habit of never happening.

The danger is not only a public repository. Those values follow the project through deploy history, backups, and every collaborator’s local copy. Once a secret leaks, deleting it from the code does not end it: the key itself has to be rotated. For whoever takes over, that lands in the first week.

You Can Change It, But You Cannot Tell If You Should

Inheriting a project with zero tests turns every edit into a gamble. You can read the code and change it, but nothing tells you the change did not break something elsewhere. So developers touch only what feels safe and leave the scary parts alone, and over time the untouchable region grows.

This shows up more often in AI-assisted code because features arrive fast and verification is easy to defer. Backfilling a full test suite at handover time is not realistic, but the paths where money moves and the paths where data is deleted need some check standing behind them. Guarding just those two turns future edits from a gamble into ordinary work.

The Same Code Will Not Run on Your Machine

This is what stops you on day one. You clone the repository, run it, and it fails: versions were never pinned, a file only ever existed locally, or some setting only works under one particular account.

Checking for it is simple. Take a clean machine, clone the repository, and follow the written instructions and nothing else. Wherever you get stuck is exactly what the documentation is missing. Doing this once with the original developer before the handover collapses days of later archaeology into a single afternoon.

Tell Us What You Have So Far

A repository URL is enough. So is a zip file and a set of credentials. Weple’s code review starts from whatever state you received and separates two questions: does this run today, and can it be maintained tomorrow. Anything urgent, like exposed secrets, we flag first; the rest comes back ordered by how soon it will bite. If you are not sure what you were even handed, that is fine. Building that list is part of the review.