Kill the code review theater, keep the review
The New Stack Ankit Jain ● Covered by 4 sources
The author argues that teams have largely replaced meaningful code review with AI review loops that focus on diffs and miss the decisions that shape the code. The article cites a 31.3% rise in PRs merged with no review at all and reports 242.7% more incidents per PR in Faros’ 2026 engineering report. It proposes a new review workflow that preserves human judgment by recording disagreements, intent, acceptance criteria, and ownership while letting machines handle repeatable checks, so the review process becomes decision-focused instead of line-by-line theater.
Why it matters
Six months ago I wrote about how to kill the code review, and I was wrong. I still think line-by-line The post Kill the code review theater, keep the review appeared first on The New Stack.