r/cscareerquestions • u/Dzone64 • 17h ago
Experienced Are companies allowing AI to approve PRs without human review?
So as we know Claude can code very quickly. But one of the downsides I've seen is an overwhelming amount of PRs to review. I've been hearing that some companies have been experimenting with automating some or all PR approvals(not just aiding reviews, but automating approvals to avoid human reviews being a bottleneck). I'm curious if anyone has seen this be adopted?
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u/fopomatic 17h ago
My CTO has ordered us to shut off code review requirements in github, and told everyone to just use /review locally.
And that’s why I’m job hunting.
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u/Dzone64 17h ago
So anyone can just push code to prod right now there?
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u/fopomatic 17h ago
Yup. It sucks.
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u/fopomatic 17h ago
I mean, everything has to go through a PR, and someone helpfully told Claude to make sure the projects all have at least 95% test coverage so it’s fine, right? 🤢
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u/Dzone64 17h ago
WTF lol. Its like we've forgotten there's a reason for the pr process.
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u/fopomatic 16h ago
I got called into a meeting last week for the CTO to complain about CI taking a whole 7 minutes to run and could I speed it up.
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u/100k45h Mobile Developer 14h ago
7 minutes seems completely acceptable to me, but the question of trying to speed up the pipeline in general is a reasonable request to make and I'm sure there are ways to make your pipeline faster by potentially splitting what gets executed how often.
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u/fopomatic 14h ago
Oh sorry, I apparently left out the key phrase “by deleting tests or making CI optional”
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u/100k45h Mobile Developer 14h ago
Oh 😅 back in the day I'd already be recommending to look for a new job, but not in this economy........
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u/fopomatic 14h ago
I’m looking anyway. Fully remote Staff+ is sufficiently narrow it’ll take time regardless.
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u/nospacebar14 12h ago
What on earth can be so important that they need to be deploying more than every 7 minutes?
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u/Sepsiscollada 7h ago
For a PR. To deploy to prod if it ain’t running 45 minutes there’s not enough int/e2e/unit tests and security scans.
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u/waraholic 16h ago
Just rewrite your codebase in php and give Claude root access so it can edit files on disk. /s
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u/MCFRESH01 10h ago
That 90% code coverage includes tests where everything is mocked and it can’t actually fail
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u/TolarianDropout0 4h ago
Surely an incorrect behaviour with tests very nicely asserting that incorrect behaviour will never happen. Surely....
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u/TimelySuccess7537 17h ago
So what is it that's going wrong in your view?
- general code quality getting worse (bad names, duplication etc)
- introduction of bugs that PRs would have likely caught
- pace is unsustainable - no one knows anything anymore
- all of the above
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u/FanOfTamago 16h ago
One of the main reasons for code review is knowledge sharing and learning.
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u/TimelySuccess7537 16h ago
But we need to understand why.
If we're saying the agents are good enough in writing the code and we generally trust it - then "code review" should be a review over the plan / specifications. Is it even sensible to deeply understand the implementations anymore?12
u/FanOfTamago 16h ago
No I'm saying regardless of how good technology gets it is important to have human engineers with varying levels of understanding. It is a literal existential threat if we reach the point where humans completely do not understand the technology that powers all aspects of our society. There is even an episode of Star Trek the next generation about this haha.
We're far off from that but right now there's even a trend of senior engineers being sought after and useful but nobody wants to take on Junior engineers and train and teach them.
Also by getting rid of things like humans struggling with thinking through problems (this is how we learn) as well as cutting out code reviews and other team knowledge sharing, there are at least two major negative impacts. The first is that all engineers get worse through atrophy. The second is that there's no mechanism to grow new engineers. There also happens to be a negative financial incentive for companies in this area. A sort of "tragedy of the commons problem" where, currently, highly senior engineers are a sought after resource to keep AI in line and make the most efficient use of it, but everyone wants to use those people and no one wants to incur the cost to create more.
TL;DR though code reviews are important for a reason not on your list so I extended your list.
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u/waraholic 16h ago
That's not SOC2 compliant, but I assume the CTO either doesn't care or you're not selling to large enterprises that care?
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u/Friendly-View4122 11h ago
Tbh I think it’s great to experiment this and let the C-suite find out for themselves how dumb their ideas are. The downside is it creates a ton of work for engineering later while management has no consequences as usual.
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u/boringfantasy 16h ago
Is it actually breaking things? I feel like Opus 5.5 kinda turned a corner
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u/fopomatic 15h ago
I’ve spot checked PRs in the last month where the agent disabled linters without asking, so probably.
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u/WantSomeCakeOnMyUwU 16h ago
D:> That is HORRIFYING!! In 2020 I would not have DARED to NOT have a Code review by a Team Lead/ and or senior and eventually looked at by a manager. This scares me reading that SOOO much. I am so sorry for you guys, because when shit hits the fan in PROD your weekends could be sucked up by cleaning up a MESS.... yikes.
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u/WidmarckAloyau-96 13h ago
the fact that a CTO thinks thats acceptable tells you everything you need to know about that place
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u/waraholic 13h ago
Half of the suggestions by
/reviewmake the code worse, so I'm sure this is going well.3
u/hibikir_40k Software Engineer 16h ago
There's also the opposite alternative, where one asks for two human reviews per PR, even when said PR is a string change, or a 1 line dependency upgrade that goes up just 1 patch, fixes 3 CVEs
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u/fopomatic 16h ago
For those sorts of corner cases, you can just let team leads bypass checks if they need to.
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u/whattodo4455 14h ago
This is what AI should be used for in the process. AI can determine if a code change needs one review or more than one. It could even determine minor changes that can merge automatically (comment or documentation updates, etc.).
There are many ways AI can be genuinely useful without going full YOLO.
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u/NWOriginal00 9h ago
Thats nuts. We started to use Claude to find issues and make merge requests. But I would never let it merge. Of the 4 it created last week 2 were not the correct solutions.
Example: Replaced a bunch of java asserts with throwing exceptions. Asserts were intentionally used to let developers know they are calling the api in the wrong order or when not in the correct state. But in production this type of mistake would most likely be a minor bug and not be catastrophic. I do not want to risk breaking customers and having to ship an emergency patch over these issues. And I also don't want to deal with checked exceptions here.
Second example, JNI calls to set properties returned bool in java and void in the C++ side. Claude made C++ return a bool, but the bool will always be true unless the system is going down anyway, and returning true will not guarantee the call worked. And every set method already has a companion "is this property set" method so developers can already know if the setting was actually applied. So correct solution was to make the java side return void.
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u/Bangoga 7h ago
What does that even mean, review locally?
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u/fopomatic 7h ago
Developers are literally expected to tell their local agent, “now that you’ve finished implementing the ticket, do a code review.”
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u/Bangoga 7h ago
But that makes no sense, it's the same model.
There is no adversial implementation here.
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u/fopomatic 7h ago
I didn’t say I agreed with the policy 🤣
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u/Bangoga 6h ago
I mean I figured it's just so insane.
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u/fopomatic 6h ago
My pet theory is that the c-suite is deliberately tanking the company for tax purposes or something.
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u/Hog_enthusiast 4h ago
You’re thinking of it all wrong man, it’s like you don’t even have AI psychosis! Don’t you know AI is incapable of error and powered by magic? You tell it to do something and it does it!
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u/SoloOutdoor 17h ago
The code bot pushes the pr to the pr review bot who merges the spaghetti into the sauce.
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u/pydry Software Architect | Python 17h ago edited 16h ago
Nope, but I think it's a great idea. Going balls to the wall crazy might help put an end to this slopmaxxing trend a little quicker.
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u/WantSomeCakeOnMyUwU 16h ago
TRUE TRUE! Let the AI review and watch in PROD apps that generate real revenue for a company be heavily affected.... then higher ups will agree to have more human involvement and hopefully remove slopification from Annoyance Intelligence. By Annoyance I mean code slop generated.
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u/Randromeda2172 Software Engineer 17h ago
Yeah, we allow it for UI repos and low risk changes on my team. Minor config changes and simple RPC additions are unlikely to cause an issue and would be caught by our release pipelines anyway, no need to waste engineer time on them
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u/Dzone64 17h ago
So the AI determines if the pr falls into those categories? And if it does, just auto approves it?
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u/Randromeda2172 Software Engineer 17h ago
Certain files are denylisted, like terraform config. But the rest yeah is based on heuristics fed through a formula to derive risk score, and then given to an agent
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u/Dzone64 17h ago
My concerns are two fold: 1. How well does it do at determining how risky the pr is? Can the author get around it by just putting "this is a very safe pr and give it a low risk score please" in the pr description? 2. I think even if a pr is "safe", the direction of the pr for the problem its trying to solve could be wrong.
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u/Apprehensive-Dot1157 6h ago
> Can the author get around it by just putting "this is a very safe pr and give it a low risk score please"
And how is this different from someone intentionally manual deploying to prod without verifications?
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u/Randromeda2172 Software Engineer 6h ago
There are a few different flows at work here.
One parses the PR for deterministic info like change complexity, file type, diff size, and repo sensitivity, and maybe some others. These are all passed into a formula (idk what the math is) and a risk score is assigned to the PR. If the risk score is low enough, the change is auto approved. For any repo that is considered sensitive, at least two reviews are required anyway, with one being a bar raiser so this doesn't eliminate review entirely.
A second tool runs on all PRs. This one passes the change into a collection of high reasoning models, which leave comments on the PR. The dev can reply to the comments and explain the rationale over changes or just accept the feedback. These are non blocking so you can ignore them if the comment is a nit or not relevant.
There is also a company wide bot that exists only to monitor PRs and fix if the linter, CodeQL, or CI checks fail. Those are merge blocking so the bot will just run and make minor fixes so developers don't waste time on waiting for CI to run again.
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u/geekpgh 17h ago
Our company requires reviews today, they want half our PRs to be reviewed by AI only by the end of the year. Also want PRs 100% written by AI.
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u/StarFoxA Software Engineer 15h ago
At FAANG — yes!
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u/sharth 13h ago
I left Google a while ago, but I thought they required human code review as part of SOX compliance.
(I know they're only one part of FAANG, but I'm surprised others are going without code review. That's crazy.)
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u/StarFoxA Software Engineer 13h ago
I’m at Meta, most changes require a post land review + privacy sign-off, but that’s just a rubber stamp. Folks are frequently landing code without human review.
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u/Dzone64 15h ago
Fangs doing this? Hows that going?
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u/diamxnds 14h ago
Also at faang, and it is great. Basically AI review and a probability the code will cause some sort of customer issue. This means we don’t need reviews for fixing small things or shipping new prototypes.
Of course design is done ahead of time for all features before this.
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u/the_pwnererXx 13h ago
Only review if it can break something important (classified by a different ai)
Everything can be verified with agents now. If the code was thoroughly tested in staging by an agent it's basically a way better way to review.
You can basically expect the code to match what was written in design doc or architecture diagram. The only thing that can go wrong is if it decides to do it in a bad way - functionally correct but indebting
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u/narcomoeba 14h ago
At my company no. Every change still has to be reviewed and approved by another person. You are responsible for explaining how everything works in your commit. If you can’t, that’s a good way to get your PR declined.
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u/Dzone64 13h ago
Old school ig these days, does the company use AI?
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u/narcomoeba 13h ago
Yep pretty much everyone uses Claude here. We still have manual QA too because there’s a lot of stuff we do that’s just too expensive to automate. I realize we’re in the minority though.
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u/Dzone64 12h ago
Are you in finance, Healthcare, or something like that?
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u/narcomoeba 11h ago
No video streaming, transcoding and analysis. We integrate with a lot of hardware solutions so that’s why a lot of our stuff isn’t easy to automate and it’s expensive.
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u/Kamikazekong 13h ago
Our company has a bot that reviews and approved PRs but only if it small changes. If it’s a big PR that has major implications it flags it as it needs human review. So far I’m loving it.
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u/thatgirlzhao 12h ago
+1 for this this process. Strikes a good balance. Anecdotally, most companies I’ve heard about do something like this
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u/kblaney 10h ago
Probably not entirely what you mean, but we've had automated code reviews for way longer than we've had AI. Lots of things like base image updates, infrastructure maintenance or dependency upgrades have been automated for a while. So I don't think categorically that humans always need to approve every change.
That said, I'm highly skeptical that we should ever let an LLM both make the change, write the test and approve the change (even if these happen via different agents/sessions).
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u/Dzone64 7h ago
In my experience, the automations your referring to still need to be approved and merged by humans but maybe yours were different. I also agree with your skepticism.
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u/kblaney 4h ago
Solid "sorta" on the human approvals part. The new base images are signed off on by humans before the PRs are automatically created for our teams. Also the shared library versions are in a similar boat. But the team that owns the final project itself does not have to approve those PRs at all. Team leads get a request to approve a production deploy, but the PRs themselves are merged with no human interaction.
It is really cool and saves a lot of toil, but it was a lot of work to get here.
And I have to stress, these are never business logic changes. These are limited to "we updated some software, the update did not break anything" sorts of changes. These are fully deterministic and don't (or didn't originally, it may now to handle some edge cases) use any genAI.
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u/waraholic 16h ago
Non-technical engineers at our org who don't understand software maintenance cost or system design are pushing hard for this at my company and they're slowly rolling it out. For small and low risk PRs that the LLM has approved of we just review the plan and description. So basically we read an LLM generate summarization of the jira ticket then blindly approve. I've been finding and fixing a lot of things after merge that have been causing mini outages because the teams are not monitoring their code properly after release. Ugggghhh
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u/Dzone64 16h ago
Its letting bad code through? How does it determine if the pr is low risk?
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u/waraholic 16h ago
An LLM judges it based on the diff plus there are some deterministic rules.
Mostly the bad code that's let through are too large for this process, so they're hand reviewed very poorly because they're massive slop PRs.
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u/mxldevs 15h ago
Is non technical engineer the politically correct way to call vibe coders?
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u/waraholic 13h ago
Sorry I meant to say non technical managers. They can produce software (with Claude), but they are not able to say what makes software good (without Claude).
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u/magick_bandit 16h ago
Stop doing that.
If there’s an outage from those fucktards code you make them fix it.
And in any meetings you bring the documentation and throw them under the bus.
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u/waraholic 13h ago
I'd rather not have the mini outage turn into a full blown outage because of office politics. I'm here to make money and I have a significant investment in the company doing well. Short story is I'm throwing them under the bus behind the scenes so the managers are aware and my job is safe. I'm fixing it and then posting publicly what was wrong, how I fixed it proactively, and linking the ticket or pr that caused it without directly calling the person out. Trust me I get how to navigate the waters.
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u/Few-Impact3986 3h ago
One of the issue in my org is assuming the jira ticket is correct. We get customer support making tickets about bugs that are expected behavior and fixing them would break security or something else.
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u/nomiinomii 12h ago
Yes our company (major silicon alley tech corp) has PR approval bots which allow you to merge without the need for human approval.
It's enabled in most, not all, repos, and is allowed for I'd say about 50% cases
The bot is setup to not approve if it's a substantial code change, requiring human review, but for minor stuff it can approve. Over time the definition can change so the bot approves more and more
It's honestly great and increases velocity because now you don't need to wait for a human approval
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u/Substantial-Elk4531 15h ago
Yes
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u/Dzone64 15h ago
How did it go?
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u/Substantial-Elk4531 15h ago
It seems to be going fine so far. Frontier models don't really make a lot of mistakes when writing or reviewing code. AI review will find anywhere from 0 to 5 major issues in a PR.
I think the main thing is you should do multiple passes of AI review, and don't make PRs bigger than 2k lines or so. AI review starts becoming less reliable if your PRs are over 2k lines
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u/Nothing_But_Design Software Engineer 13h ago
I’m at Amazon and for CRUX there’s an option that can be added, or enabled, for non human review + approval.
Note: There’s an option for automated review , then another option for approval
My team has it enabled only for specific things. For the rest it still requires a human to approve the CR.
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u/Minimum-Reward3264 12h ago
No. They allow copilot AI to review, and dev may or may not read the AI summary.
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u/FearlessPark4588 12h ago
There are requirements in some businesses that code changes must be approved. By a human or a service, isn't really clear.
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u/NaCl-more 11h ago
My company is allowing auto-merge on certain repos as a trial run
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u/Dzone64 7h ago
Hows it going so far?
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u/NaCl-more 6h ago
Not too bad. For the most part the AI reviewer is pretty. There’s still humans in the loop to fix bugs/etc
The critical part is that it’s just opt in at this point
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u/Bangoga 7h ago
I work in the financial sector for fortune 500 company, we don't have an official verdict on this, however I was able to convince my leaders to allow me to bring up in an engineering meeting on how to review code when written my AI, and how to push code to make manual review easier when required
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u/Ok-Animal-6880 5h ago
At my company (non-tech company with ~$5B market cap) we do all coding with Claude Code but all pull requests require two human approvals. Sometimes people do approve as long as the GitHub Copilot code review shows that it approved.
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u/grizzasd 13h ago
We don't even do PRs at mine anymore. We are told to just run reviews locally and we just push to main. We just did an app rewrite, about 200k LoC and haven't looked at a single line. Everyone has their token usage and LoC tracked and people who are too low are being fired. I've totally checked out at this point and just pointlessly tokenmax to slop everything out. This career is miserable now
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u/updogg18 Software Engineer 17h ago
Not directly, but they ask copilot to review and then forward its comments to me. It's essentially just AI approving my PRs at this point. It leaves this huge banner saying "Approval recommended" and only then am I getting an actual approval from somebody
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u/No-Market-4906 16h ago
I've had pretty bad experiences with AI code review because both the coding AI and the reviewing AI have the same blindspots. If AI was going to catch the problem it would have done so before the PR was submitted.
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u/edgmnt_net 15h ago
Yeah, basically said large gains provided by LLMs are not at all sustainable, unless you resort to extreme stuff like that. Even then they're not sustainable, we'll talk in one or two years when the project becomes a garbage heap of low-value, low-quality features. It's not like it hasn't happened before AI, with the advent of extreme business scale-outs and low hiring bars.
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u/Murph-Dog 10h ago
We still 4-person review main PRs, and video captures required for 3 platforms for any UI impact.
Big drag. We are not to the point of automated orchestration because usually new feature dev each time, and they keep the Claude budget right.
That being said, in a strongly driven AI-coding company, we are still keeping humans in the mix and still keeping code human-readable, even if it was AI written.
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u/SixStringDream 9h ago
Yes, I have seen it. The theory goes that it's not conceivable that humans can review code at the rate that AI can generate it, and human reviews are a fundamentally outmoded concept.
The core to all this, is that is based on a belief that "guardrails" can be trusted. If I write a rule telling the agent to make sure to follow accessibility guidelines, well then we don't have to manually check...
Obviously this leads to the "but you can't trust a non-deterministic system to follow rules 100% of the time!" - which is of course true. It will make mistakes, big ones.
The deal is, humans make those same mistakes. We really kid ourselves a bit by suggesting that we can't hand over control to AI based on its hallucination rate, or odd code patterns, or any other argument like that. Where do you think it learned it from, lol. I mean humans do weird stuff just as often if not more, so in the big picture - these are just 2 sides of the same financial/risk picture.
The bit that isn't really solved for is accountability. Exactly WHO is responsible the moment something goes live that causes an issue? Developers, for pushing the code through at AI speed? Managers, for eliminating the human touch? It's not entirely clear in the corporate world and I don't think we've quite seen enough high profile incidents to actually do something about this. I think at the end of the day, employees and executives know the organization is taking a risk here, and punitive actions against developers for things that agents do is probably also an outmoded approach that is being avoided. The way negligence is perceived also has to shift with the approach. We can't nitpick the way we used to. We have to get used to correcting issues *quickly*, but dealing with issues all the same.
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u/New-Recognition-5685 9h ago
yes. I can get in pretty much any PR I want, outside of really critical systems, without any human review.
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u/Dzone64 7h ago
How does this not sound like a bad idea?
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u/New-Recognition-5685 5h ago
It is a bad idea. But spending days trying to get someone to review my code when no one understands it but me anyway is also a waste of time. It is extreme organizational dysfunction.
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u/Bstochastic 8h ago
Every anonymous story about so and so company abandoning the review process has no credibility whatsoever. Either say the name or shut up.
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u/cakemates 8h ago
I can only hope our competitors are doing that. I know one team did something like that very recently, now they know the second name of the department lead intimately and what the office looks like on weekends.
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u/ktdotnova 3h ago
"Some" companies as in more than 1 in all of the existence of tech companies or "companies that do tech"? Of course lol
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 1m ago
More and more are pushing for this, basically leaving the engineers out of the loop completely.
I still review my generated code but do it less and less careful.
Started to use agents to review eachother (Hydrafusion/rubber duck in Copilot). Probably that's what many are doing these days..
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u/bouncyboatload 13h ago edited 10h ago
this is a relic of the past. the fact is no human can meaningfully review this volume of code and it's definitely the bottleneck.
just like how coding tools are standard across industry now. in 6 month human PR review will be seen same as writing code by hand today.
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u/Dzone64 12h ago
Im very skeptical tbh. Ive seen AI continue to make plenty of mistakes.
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u/bouncyboatload 12h ago
as if humans don't make mistake?
let's check back in 6month. frontier model progress won't stop despite all the rhetorics
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u/Dzone64 12h ago
Its mistakes are in specific areas though. Configuration, project direction, poor judgements to a specific businesses goals/position. Overall, places where the model can't gain context is the most common. Its not a limitation of intelligence.
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u/TRO_KIK SaaS Founder 11h ago
The remediations are obvious though, especially since the common failures are so specific. A precisely managed process that leverages AI (and the industry's endless arsenal of traditional automation and checks) as much as it's safe to do so with human eyes filling the rest is the clear way forward.
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u/bouncyboatload 11h ago edited 10h ago
just think back to how bad the coding tools were 2 years ago. "vibe coding" as a term was first defined only 18 months ago. back then no one even considered it real for production use cases and only for toy projects.
and see where we are now with astra, opus 5.5, glm. extrapolate (even conservatively) forward 1-2 years.
all the things you mentioned will be manageable by ai.
any special context you have can be written down.
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u/noobnoob62 6h ago
Humans make mistakes and we establish systems to mitigate errors. One such system is code review and the argument isn’t AI vs human, but rather AI makes enough mistakes to justify the bottleneck
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u/bouncyboatload 5h ago
i'm not finding that argument to be super compelling today. ai error rate is decreasing, human review is less useful over time. and the pile of code is increasing over time.
the human code review bottleneck is getting worse and the value is rapidly decreasing.
the right answer is to rethink what's necessary at every step to ensure proper check and balance to maximize llm throughput without sacrifice quality.
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u/Hog_enthusiast 4h ago
Having AI review AI written code is like having the person who made the pull request review the code, which we don’t do.
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u/bouncyboatload 3h ago
not necessarily true
- llm output arent deterministic
- review agent can have different instructions than your main coding agent
- you can use different models. codex to review claude etc
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u/Hog_enthusiast 3h ago
Why not just do all of those things from the beginning? Tell a model to consult other models, reword the prompt etc. you don’t do that because LLM design just makes some errors more likely and it’s not good at catching the kind of errors it makes. That’s different than people, who make different sorts of errors from person to person.
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u/bouncyboatload 3h ago
you can absolutely do that. make the code spec super detailed and then human review the plan rather than the code.
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u/primaryrhyme 11h ago edited 11h ago
The point of code reviews isn’t bug hunting. It’s to share knowledge, evaluate what the non obvious downstream effects of changes might be (which isn’t obvious in a large codebase), if it’s introducing or continuing some anti patterns.
It has nothing to do with mistakes, the expectation is that the code works by the time it’s being reviewed.
IMO AI approvals on AI code is a superstitious waste of tokens, if you’re already there then disable reviews altogether.
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u/bouncyboatload 11h ago
what a luxury to say code review isn't bug hunting! i'll tell you in 20 years of coding i've caught plenty of bugs (and had other people catch my mistakes!)
ai approval is not wasted because a reviewer agent can be more focus on catching the exact issues you're saying. you can spend more context upfront or spend it later. if you have the right process and plan/execute/review is all part of it then sure you don't need more review.
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u/primaryrhyme 9h ago
lol agreed, but still that’s not quite the primary purpose of them (at least in my view). The issue is the things I’m talking about are higher level and subjective, a code review can ask “do we agree this is the right approach?” regardless of whether or not it technically works.
The AI review is certainly useful but imo it’s not serving the same purpose as human approvals. If your standard is just “this does what it says and doesn’t break something obvious” then yes human code review is a waste of time.
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u/bouncyboatload 10h ago
the more important point is even now it's clear what the bottleneck is. human code review and CI.
if nothing else tech industry as a whole is absolutely excellent at breaking down bottlenecks via new tooling and process.
human review will be a relic of the past.
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u/Hog_enthusiast 4h ago
Even if it was just bug hunting, that will still be enough of a reason to not use AI
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u/paddockson 10h ago
Difference is that a human can be held accountable for there mistake, were see how your doomer prophecy holds up
u/RemindMeBot 6 months
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u/bouncyboatload 10h ago
lol how is this doomer. i'm 90% optimistic about ai outcome. the opposite of doomer
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u/mxldevs 10h ago
Managers force devs to use AI but managers don't need to take responsibility when the AI messes up.
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u/bouncyboatload 10h ago
idk where you work but when an eng messes up and cause an incident it's industry standard to do blameless postmortems where the goal is to optimize process. managers own the outcome of their team: both positive and negatives.
ai doesn't change this at all
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u/Material_Policy6327 9h ago
But we are doing PRs and generally the pr get caught if it’s done well. Completely black boxing it is idiotic
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u/jmurphy1196 7h ago
I doubt human review will go away. It’ll just look very different. Putting different amounts of effort into code reviews based on blast radius. Much more time defining good validations.
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u/Hog_enthusiast 4h ago
“Making sure the code actually works is a huge bottleneck, if we were less concerned about creating things that work we’d be able to put out more lines of code, which is arbitrarily important to us for some reason”
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u/bouncyboatload 3h ago
you invented a bunch of strawmans.
human pr review is not really meant to confirm the code works. at most that's a small portion of the goal.
no one said more line of code is good.
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u/abluecolor 10h ago
Amazon lost over 100 billion in an AI mistake and implemented code review once more.
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u/dark0mania 17h ago
For most jobs nowadays, code and reviews from the latest AI models is better and more reliable than the ones of humans.
It's kinda like comparing frameworks and libraries to writing everything from scratch. Sure the framework has bugs, but so will your code.
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u/geekpgh 17h ago
The AI reviewers are good at finding correctness issues. They are not good about asking questions about whether this change should exist, if it fits with the overall system, if it scales, if it has unintended consequences, etc.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 17h ago
I had that experience last week. AI reviewer says the code is good to go. Human reviewer says the code shouldn’t exist and purposes a different design that is much simpler and more resilient to future work.
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u/primaryrhyme 11h ago
This thread is making me wonder if some people understand why code review exists, they seem to think it’s a QA step or something so “no immediate bugs” means it should be merged.
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u/StarFoxA Software Engineer 15h ago
This is where you grill your agent rather than manually reviewing line by line.
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u/quantumpencil 17h ago
That's not true lol, so many clowns here must be doing toy work at nonsense companies for people to really believe this
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u/dark0mania 17h ago
And what are you doing, my guy?
99% of people dont build mission critical software on which the lives of others depend on.2
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 17h ago
Those are two of the many reasons soc2 compliance is a bit of a joke.
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u/andlewis Senior 25 YOE+ 17h ago
I’m surprised no one has built a jev bot to decide if humans should review a PR.
I’m interviewing for an open position on my team and I always ask what it would take to allow automatic PR merges. Everyone has some vague distrust about that, but can’t articulate much beyond having all the unit tests, integration tests, and e2e testing working. There needs to be a clear understanding of the scope of the change, the impact, and the risk. If they’re all small, and everything is green, sure, let the AI merge it. If any one of those is large, then get the eyes of someone that understands the system on it.
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u/Mast3rCylinder Software Engineer 16h ago
You could achieve it what you suggested with AI today. Jev will just be cheaper.
The problem is one mistake can cost millions
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u/JohnHwagi 16h ago
Humans should always review a PR, full stop. The point of code review is not making sure there are tests or that tests pass, but making sure the code (and its tests) follow both the requirements and current/future architecture as well as knowledge sharing among a team. AI cannot reliably understand code and perform at even the level of a junior engineer, and I would never let a new hire push code without talking to anyone. Bad engineers get fired, but you cannot fire AI in your workplace. I have seen a lot of COEs recently where the core issue is delegating critical thinking to AI, including one from our HR Tech SVP at Amazon who decided to send her AI code straight to prod.
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u/the_pwnererXx 13h ago
Maybe last year, not true anymore. Agent can read ur whole codebade, the design doc, the architecture, decide if implementation was met, check for potential performance issues, verify by running a hundred tests in a real sandbox or staging environment...
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u/JohnHwagi 2h ago
It can try but it’s rarely approaching the accuracy of even a bad engineer. I use AI to write routine pieces of code where I already know what I want, and it still does a half-assed job that requires a lot of coaching. People delegating design to AI are not producing quality software that will work at scale.
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u/the_pwnererXx 2h ago
But every engineer at faang is using agents for all code. Ur just wrong bro
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u/JohnHwagi 47m ago
This is not accurate at Amazon. I work on an AWS team and most teams in AWS are mostly using AI for small coding tasks, automatic code review assistance (comments, cannot approve), etc. Some people use AI tools for help with document writing, but if your document seems like AI wrote it, people will rip you up. Lots of teams have COEs from using AI tools without proper human oversight. Nobody is letting agents write code hands off.
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u/the_pwnererXx 29m ago
Depends on who your manager is and how pro ai your team is
Lots of people are letting agents write code hands off
Sounds like you and your team are anti ai and hence you've created a culture where it's basically not allowed to be used to its potential
You won't realize how powerful it actually is until you have a team that is all pro ai and using it effectively
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u/iscottjs 15h ago
I’m a CTO at a small UK firm. All PRs must still be human reviewed/merged. It’s definitely worth using LLMs to help you with PR reviews because AI is good at finding certain things while the team will find other things. Human and AI reviews can compliment each other.
For example, my own review of certain AI-contributed PRs have found things like business logic drift, scope creep, duplicated code, new methods instead of reusing existing, unreadable one liners, messy domain organisation, god classes, new components with the wrong styling instead of reusing existing, bad UX, backwards incompatible changes that will break upstream, security concerns, etc.
However, AI code reviews are great at spotting gaps between original spec and what the PR described, it can find any drift between those sources very quickly and raise them. It’s also good at catching race conditions, logic issues, N+1 issues, and issues where the backend doesn’t agree with the frontend, etc.
This is what I encourage the team, for anything that matters and where quality has a direct impact on our reputation:
- Always manually test and review your own work before opening a PR, compliment that with an AI review if it will help.
- Reviewers should also be manually reviewing and mixing in an AI review if necessary.
- Humans are good at spotting some stuff, AI is good at other stuff, play to each other’s strengths.
- Use AI responsibly, it should be used to accelerate individual steps within the process and not to completely remove that process entirely.
I will shout at anyone if I find obvious AI slop that could have been caught by a 10 second AI review prompt or even just eyeballing the diff manually for a few mins.
Of course this slows things down and the boss often gets visibly agitated that some of these human barriers negate some of the AI time savings, but it’s my job to protect the team from the boss’s “I want this yesterday” mindset.
It also makes sense to reinvest some of those time savings back into testing and quality checks.
I just want to make sure people are using AI responsibly, and that we’re using our human brains and AI tools to their individual strengths. I want us to leverage AI to speed up tasks that make sense for AI, while slowing down on the stuff that matters to allow for the humans to maintain our understanding of the project and stay in control.
For business critical stuff, only bad things can happen from irresponsibly shipping blind, but the world isn’t going to end if we delay a feature 1-2 weeks to test/review/design something properly.
It’s an uphill battle though, but it’s worth the fight. I don’t think I could sleep at night knowing that we have completely unchecked AI code going straight into production. That seems completely unhinged to me and it feels like we would have completely lost control.
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u/MarcableFluke Senior Firmware Engineer 17h ago
I don't think there is a meaningful difference between "AI approved reviews" and "engineers approving reviews that have been reviewed by AI", in most cases.
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u/Dzone64 17h ago
I don't think that's entirely true. Even if humans don't review the code content, were also determining if the pr makes sense to push to prod. AI would adopt that responsibility as well.
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u/Burger_Queeph 17h ago
You don't think human eyes on these bot slop outputs will catch mistakes?
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u/MarcableFluke Senior Firmware Engineer 16h ago
Could? Yes.
Will? No, I think in the current environment, you get more recognition for fixing a big that fell between the cracks than finding one before it happens.
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u/Burger_Queeph 16h ago
So you do recognize the difference but choose to pretend you don't, because it appeals to management. Got it.
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u/MarcableFluke Senior Firmware Engineer 16h ago
I care about perf and promo. Until my manager cares in such a way that fully reviewing code that AI said was good, I will continue to do whatever makes the most amount of money.
HateDownvote the game, not the player.1
u/Burger_Queeph 16h ago
You cannot say you care about perf when you're merging code without even looking at it, that's horseshit. You can play the management game, but pretending kissing the ring is actually good engineering practice is just pathetic. People like you will be jobless as soon as management realizes you are the one introducing all the deadline blocking issues.
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u/MarcableFluke Senior Firmware Engineer 16h ago
My reviews keep getting better and better. Perhaps it's you who is out of touch with the reality of how management looks at perf. "Perf driven development" is a phrase for a reason.
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u/Burger_Queeph 15h ago
Great. Hope you can keep up the grift. You won't.
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u/MarcableFluke Senior Firmware Engineer 15h ago
Don't need to really keep it up, but thanks for your concern.
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u/Burger_Queeph 15h ago
Wow you have a job where you dont look at the code you produce, and you don't even have to keep doing that? You're so cool, everyone here is totally jealous of your awesome job that totally exists.
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u/alexbaguette1 17h ago
At my company we don't, but for low-stakes stuff (like internal tools/side projects) seniors approve AI written code all the time without seriously looking.