The argument over whether engineers should stop reading code is over, because we already have.

Faros AI’s new report shows a 76.3% increase in pull requests merged without review since their last report in April. Many companies now run AI reviews on 50% to 80% of their PRs. AI review took over bug-finding. But it didn’t take over the conversation where a team debates what it decided and why, and that is the part I missed too.

Most teams are stuck in one of two modes. They review every line and become the bottleneck, or they rubber-stamp and lose track of what changed and why. There is no middle ground yet.

“The argument over whether engineers should stop reading code is over, because we already have.”

AI review is good at the mechanical half of the job. It never gets tired, it reads every line, and it holds the same standard on every PR. But it never saw what was decided. It won’t tell you not to build something, and it can’t be accountable for the result. A better model won’t fix that, because the tool reads the wrong artifact at the wrong time.

As I wrote in “ Kill the code review theater, keep the review ,” code review is how a team builds a mental model of its system. That has been the only scheduled moment for engineers to talk to each other about that system. Teams that hand code reviews to AI tools rarely notice they’ve also given up that moment.

Source link