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I don't get why I am allowed to post an answer to my question in the question's editor:

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I know from Stack Overflow that this feature exists on Stack Exchange websites.

It seems relevant for Stack Overflow, indeed someone may have the answer to a question that hasn't been already been answered on the site.

However, I don't believe it makes sense to have this feature on Code Review. Am I not supposed to seek someone else's point of view, advice and expertise to determine how to improve my code? I can't just come up with a question on a code snippet and improve it myself. That doesn't make sense to me.

The link shown next to the checkbox: "share your knowledge, Q&A-style" points to an article by Jeff Atwood on the StackOverflow blog...

Does this feature really belong on Code Review? I mean are there any questions that have immediately been answered by the person who asked it?


Just to make sure: I'm not against the possibility of answering your own question. Sure a user could do that. I am specifically referring to the possibility of answering your question when editing the question itself.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Here you have an example that it's sometimes useful, admittedly not exacly Code Review, it's on Meta, but pretty close ;-) \$\endgroup\$
    – t3chb0t
    Commented Jul 7, 2018 at 0:14

3 Answers 3

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I cannot conceive of a reason to have the answer-immediate option on a question post. Sure, we do have good reasons to answer our own questions, but there's no good reason to answer it at the same time as asking it.

So, no, it is not needed, and probably should not be there.

Having said that, it may not be easy to remove just for Code Review.

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    \$\begingroup\$ "Having said that, it may not be easy to remove just for Code Review." Exactly. I can't imagine SE was designed with one site wanting to remove that feature in mind, and their backlog of things to do is long enough already. Can't see them taking up this low-priority task anytime soon. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mast Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2018 at 17:00
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  • You might have already received some code review from elsewhere. You could include it in your question, asking what people think about those suggested changes, but asking for a review of a code review is somewhat meta. Just place the off-site code review into an answer and see what votes it receives compared to other reviews.

  • You have some alternative idea(s) for your current code, but are unsure if they are good or not. As posting non-working code is discouraged and you do not want to go the whole nine yards to turn your question into a , you might as well post your own review of your code with the changes you have in mind. You could consider this an exhibitionistic form of rubber duck debugging.

    "Yes, eermm, rubber duck, I would, err change that class there err and maybe extract an interface. And I'm totally only talking to you rubber duck. It's not like somebody could employ a voting mechanism on what I'm telling you. Hahaha, 'somebody'- how that sounds! As if there's anybody else around except for the two of us, rubber duck. No. Just us."

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It is definitely against the grain as it can discourage other answers. Also, most people are here because they want that extra input from someone else. Self-bias is the worst. However, I have historically used this feature (and might in the future).

I always hate my old code (think months), it just looks poor and clunky. The sentiment that you should be a better coder than you were yesterday is true (for me at least). I was trying to generate content for less frequented tags a while back so I took old code, that I knew how to improve, and critiqued it myself.

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