Code review is not about catching bugs

6 hours ago

The primary purpose of code review is not to catch bugs, but to determine if a change should be part of the product, involving judgment on architecture, complexity, and alignment with product vision.
Code review, tests, and production observability serve distinct roles: tests check if code meets intent, observability reveals system behavior, and code review evaluates if the intent is the right thing to build.
With AI-generated code, code review is shifting from assessing implementation quality to reviewing intent, taste, architecture, and product coherence, as the code may lack implicit design context.
Code review is a key collaborative process for teams to exercise shared judgment, develop mutual understanding, and maintain institutional knowledge, which becomes more critical as automation increases.
The real bottleneck in software development is judgment, not code review or validation, as automation handles mechanical tasks, elevating the need for human decision-making on what and whether to build.
As AI changes code authorship, review practices must evolve to focus on intent, distinguish changes requiring human judgment, and preserve collaboration, with tools handling automated checks.

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