What are code reviews even for?
Engineering Enablement ● Covered by 2 sources
AI coding tools at Meta and across the industry are generating code 106% faster than human reviewers can evaluate it, with review backlogs swelling into thousands of pending diffs. The core problem isn't defect detection—which accounts for only 14% of review comments—but knowledge transfer and shared understanding, which automated review threatens to erode into cognitive and intent debt. Organizations should use AI to automate only low-risk routine changes while protecting human review for high-judgment decisions that build team expertise and ownership.
Why it matters
Code review helps teams build shared understanding of systems, and automating the process removes that critical understanding. AI accelerates cognitive and intent debt that doesn't appear on dashboards but becomes expensive to recover later.