saw some stats that incidents per pr are up over 240% lately. it's pretty wild because everyone thinks ai helps with speed but it's clearly just making things more unstable. the whole point of reviews isn't even about catching errors, it's mostly just so we don't lose the mental model of how the system actually works. if you stop reading diffs and just rely on 'swiss cheese' layers like agents and linters, you're basically
deleting erasing the only way knowledge moves around a team. i can't imagine how people are supposed to maintain anything when 31% of merges are happening with zero human eyes on them. it feels like we're just trading understanding for pure velocity. anyone actually managing to keep their head above water without checking every single line?
more here:
https://thenewstack.io/kill-code-review-theater/