alt Hacker NewsAs a senior engineer that is struggling to give up line-by-line reviews, I agree with your take.
I've spent literal decades where one of the most valuable practices has been code reviews, for many dimensions. It is one of the best ways to ensure quality production releases. It is one of the best ways to transfer skill to junior engineers. It increases tribal knowledge throughout the engineering org by exposing others to systems they may not be working in. The number of benefits to a traditional human-centric engineering team is hard to overstate.
But I'm starting to feel that instead of starting at one extreme (heavy handed reviews) and moving towards less review, it probably makes more sense to start at the other extreme (no review at all) and move towards a brand new practice tailored for the new agentic reality.
It is looking increasingly likely that we don't need to modify code review for the agentic era, we need some completely new practice that hasn't yet been invented.
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It's really about hamstringing the AIs so they can't write crap. Writing code is not a problem anymore, so anyone with an idea can write a script to do what they want. But if they try to connect two ideas together, now they have a data modeling problem. This is where everything seems to fail with AI coding (largely because the original author had the idea piecemeal).
Perhaps spec review in the custom of code review - it can even be via PR - so there is a bottleneck before anything is generated, instead of after. Cheap-to-produce code maybe isn't worth understanding line-by-line anymore.