Code review English that doesn't sound passive-aggressive

The tone problem

"Why did you do this?" reads like an attack — even when you genuinely just want context. Native engineers soften it almost automatically:

"Out of curiosity, what made you go with this approach?"

Five swaps to memorise

• "This is wrong" → "I think there might be an edge case here when X happens."
• "Change this" → "Could we try extracting this into a helper?"
• "You missed…" → "We might want to add a null check for X."
• "Bad name" → "What about renaming this to make the intent clearer?"
• "It's not your fault" → "No worries, the original code wasn't obvious."

Receiving feedback gracefully

The phrase I use most: "Good catch — let me push a fix." It's short, friendly, and signals you actually read the comment.