How to Kill the Code Review – by Ankit Jain – Latent.Space
March 3, 2026
Humans already couldn’t keep up with code review when humans wrote code at human speed. Every engineering org I’ve talked to has the same dirty secret: PRs sitting for days, rubber-stamp approvals, and reviewers skimming 500-line diffs because they have their own work to do.
We tell ourselves it is a quality gate, but teams have shipped without line-by-line review for decades. Code review wasn’t even ubiquitous until around 2012-2014, one veteran engineer told me, there just aren’t enough of us around to remember.
And even with reviews, things break. We have learned to build systems that handle failure because we accepted that review alone wasn’t enough. This shows in terms of feature flags, rollouts, and instant rollbacks.
One of the concerns most strongly expressed about AI code generation is the huge challenges it presents humans in reviewing that code. But here, Ankit-Jane argues that even before AI code generation. Reviewers typically wouldn’t review code line by line.
In fact, code review is a relatively recent practice in many organizations. So what’s to be done? Ankit argues we need to move toward AI code review. But what might that look like? Here he describes it in detail.
