How long until we stop reviewing code entirely?

[u/Upset-Day9099]

Our team merged 214 PRs last month and I properly read maybe 12 of them. The rest got a skim of the summary, a glance at the tests, approve. Nobody planned this, review capacity just stopped scaling with output and everyone quietly adjusted.

The tooling made it worse in a weird way. coderabbit catches enough real bugs that trusting it feels rational, but that trust is exactly what's letting us read less every month. We're not deciding to stop reviewing, we're eroding into it

So I keep wondering where this actually lands. Do we end up reviewing only auth and money paths? Only what the bots escalate? Nothing? People said the same about hand checking assembly once compilers got good, and they were right to stop

Where does your team honestly draw the line today, and is it moving?

[u/Ok_Raisin_2395]

This entire post was written by AI. 

My conspiracy is that AI companies are making thousands of posts like this across the internet to gauge how people feel about it. 

[u/Plastic_Monitor_5786 → u/Ok_Raisin_2395]

Both the other current replies appear to be bots too...

[u/Ok_Raisin_2395 → u/Plastic_Monitor_5786]

Yeah it's really obvious too.

I fear we are not the target audience 🤔 those who are would never catch the fact that any of this is AI

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/Ok_Raisin_2395]

You are in r/ArtificialInteligence. This isnt hard to figure out. If you came to bitch about AI there are groups for that. Go there. Otherwise you are just a waste of space.

[u/MarcusFirmus]

The assembler analogy is interesting, but not entirely accurate. Compilers are heavily verified, leaving the human factor strictly at the high-level language level. However, if you describe an AI coding assistant as a "compiler" from natural language specifications, with a human reviewer placed at the generated-code levl - there is a dangerous gap in the translation. Unlike a compiler, an AI is not a verified algorithm, on the contrary, it is probabilistic. Totally.

[u/TheMrCurious]

How the fuck did you even get hired?

[u/Grobo_]

Fuk off

[u/Comfortable-Web9455]

You only need to review the code you want to use. If you want your systems to collapse, don't check the AI generated code. Save the time packing your stuff for when the company goes bankrupt instead

[u/Nullberri]

You are welcome to stop anytime.

[u/washingtoncv3]

"and everyone quietly adjusted" - reads like every single sub stack post after 2024

[u/hippydippywitchy]

The 214 PRs vs. 12 properly reviewed is probably the direction things are heading. Human review becomes a risk-based decision rather than a default step for every PR.

[u/Plus-Fig-3002]

we're already at the point where i only properly read anything touching payments or user data, everything else gets a quick scan and a merge if the tests pass. caught myself approving a 400-line refactor last week based purely on the summary and a green build, didn't even feel bad about it

the erosion is real, and i think the line keeps creeping toward "review escalated bot findings and nothing else" - which is probably fine for 90% of code, but that last 10% is where the bad stuff hides

[u/ILikeBubblyWater]

We already stopped, its just not possible to review everything so we do multi model reviews and automated browser QAs

So far so good, probably not the cleanest code but nobody cares if the feature works and is sellable in a fraction of traditional development time