Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code

As AI accelerates code production beyond human review capacity, Rachel Laycock argues that code review has become a bottleneck and a crutch. Drawing on a panel discussion with Brian Houck of DX, she contends that the real value of review—knowledge sharing, mentoring, collective ownership—should be achieved earlier through pairing, design sessions, and automated checks. Instead of automating the review ceremony, she advocates 'review by exception' for high-risk changes, emphasizing that engineers need to understand systems, not diffs.