I think it's worse than that. At least if I dumped 5k LoC on somebody in 2021, you knew I spent the time to write it, so it's "fair" to ask you to read it. But I didn't write it in 2026, so you shouldn't read it.

I think it's less about "break it down" and more about "let's communicate at the same altitude."

I wrote a (bait-titled) post about it: https://tern.sh/blog/stop-reading-prs/

You aren't allowed to block PRs for being too large anymore. The objective that every engineer should be 2x/3x/5x more productive can only be achieved if you go totally lax on code reviews.

Because if all your SWEs produce 5x more code, it also means they have to review 5x more code. But LLMs don't really help with code reviews. Then it becomes a Metcalfian paradox unless you just rubberstamp PRs, which is what is expected of you.

Breaking up a giant PR can be a tedious, time-consuming hassle, and in the past I could sympathize in practice if someone had a giant PR they didn't have time to decompose once they got it working.

But it's also the exact sort of thing that LLMs are literally perfect for in my experience so there's really no excuse anymore. I've never seen Claude fail to turn a 5k PR into a well-decomposed Graphite stack.

It is not so much forgetting as much as it is acceptance that when welcoming AI into a codebase, the code can no longer matter; that all that matters is that the properties of the system are validated. That isn't a change that comes free, so nobody should be expecting magic, it is a different set of tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a panacea.

I think they expect you to also use an LLM to review, and I bet they are doing exactly that when asked to review someone else's code.

> If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks.

I would, and all my training at Google told me to do that. But what I found after I left that comfortable box was that somehow this kind of practice is acceptable in the industry at large and you're expected to just Deal With It(tm). 5k lines isn't even high by what I've seen.

Worse the "code review" tools that people have access to in GitHub make this absolutely and totally unworkable to incrementally improve review. Messy merge commits full of "responding to code review" comments. Threads impossible to follow. Just bad tooling.

So a lot of shops, from what I've seen, are just yeeting it with very shallow reviews.

This is my observation pre agentic AI. LLMs just threw kerosene on that dumpster fire.