How do you approach code review and maintain quality in a C++ codebase?

C++ gives you many ways to be subtly wrong, so lean on tooling and reserve human attention for design.

Automated:

• clang-format so formatting never appears in review.
• clang-tidy with the modernize, bugprone, and core guideline checks — it catches whole categories of error mechanically.
• Sanitizers in CI, at minimum ASan and UBSan on the test suite. This is the highest-value practice in C++ and many teams still skip it.
• Warnings as errors with -Wall -Wextra.

What humans should review: ownership and lifetime — who owns this pointer and how long does it live; exception safety; whether the interface is easy to misuse; and const-correctness.

Note: The single most useful review question in C++ is "what happens if this throws halfway through?" It surfaces resource leaks and broken invariants that compile perfectly. Mentioning RAII as the structural answer — that resources should be owned by objects so cleanup is automatic — shows you think in terms of preventing bugs rather than catching them.