I was taking with a friend/coworker this week. I came to the realization “Code Reviews Are Dead”.
They were already on life support. The need to “move fast” “there is no time”, “we have a 79 file PR with 7k line changes that we have been working on for 6 weeks. Can you please review it quickly? We wanna demo tomorrow GTM meeting”. Management found zero value in code reviews. You still can’t catch everything, so what’s the point? They can’t measure what the value of such process is.
Now? Now every junior dev is pushing 12 PRs a week, all adding 37 new files and thousands of lines that have been auto generated with a ton of patterns and themes that are all over the place and you are expecting anyone to keep up?
Just merge it. I have seen people go from:
> “asking who is best to review changes in area X? I have a couple of questions to make sure I’m doing things right”
To
> “this seems to work fine. Can I get a quick review? Trying to push it out and see how it works”
To
> “need 2 required approvals on this PR please?”
> I came to the realization “Code Reviews Are Dead”.
If that's how it works at your company then run as fast as you can. There are many reasonable alternatives that won't push this AI-generated BS on you.
That is, if you care. If you don't then please stay where you are so reasonable places don't need to fight in-house pressure to move in that direction.
Oh my god.. The horror.. Please do not let this be my future..
The horror indeed, but I don't really see a way out of this. Was mainly curious to see how it would affect something like "Peer Review" though I suspect the incetives there are different so the processes might only shares the word "Review" without much baring on each other.
Regarding code reviews, I can't see a way out unfortunately. We already have github (and others) agents/features where you write an issue on a repo, and kick off an agent to "implement it and send a PR for the repo". As it exists today, every repo has 100X more issues and discussions and comments than it has PRs. now imagine if the barrier to opening a PR is basically: Open an issue + click "Have a go at it, GitHub" button. Who has the time or bandwidth to review that? That wouldn't make any sense either.
Based on my experience, many reviewers are already using AI extensively. I recently ran reviewer feedback from a top CS conference through an AI detector, and two out of three responses were clearly flagged as AI-generated.
In my view, the peer-review process is flawed. Reviewers have little incentive to engage meaningfully. There’s no financial compensation, and often no way to even get credit for it. It would be cool to have something like a Google Scholar page for reviewers to showcase their contributions and signal expertise.
The only thing worse than an LLM for making stuff up and giving fake numbers is an LLM "Detector". They are so full of false positives and false negatives and bogus percentages, as to be actively harmful to human trust and academic integrity. And how do you follow up, to verify or falsify their results?