AI tools are flooding PR queues and the instinct everywhere is to call review the bottleneck. I think that’s the wrong question. The reviewer is the last sync point before production changes. The goal shouldn’t be how to remove the gate, but how to make it cheaper to operate.

When you call the humans who keep production safe “the bottleneck” you’re painting a very specific picture. The reviewer as the obstacle. The gate as friction. Something to route around. Cue in the Balrog scene from Lord of the Rings. That picture determines what you build. The tools to remove reviewers look different from tools to support them.

  • robojeb
    8·
    4 days ago

    Ideally you can do that, but even the most well designed software ends up needing a larger refactor/reorganization that will touch a large portion of the code base.

    My boss likes to say “you aren’t qualified to design something until you have built it once” which I do feel rings true. This inevitably leads to at least one major redesign for a significant codebase.