“My view is code reviews in large part is people in many cases trying to just escape the accountability of merging things into production. And if you have that culture, then to me, that's a sign that you need to invest way more in CD and CI.”

Latent Space · AI Builders · October 2026

Asked how Modal reviews code now that non-technical staff commit it too, the Modal CEO said code reviews there are optional. He argued that especially with AI, a human doesn't need to look at every change, as long as testing, rate limits and decoupled systems are strong.

Latent Space · 2026-10-22 Listen to the episode → More from Erik Bernhardsson → More AI Builders quotes →

Transcript

Latent Space

Speaker 2

…lot of people who are not in the tech team still write code. So that to me is like, you know, a recent phenomenon. But I actually don't know if it's like necessarily cost by Gen AI, but I think Gen AI has greatly accelerated it because it made it even lower. The cost of writing code is even easier.

Speaker 1

So if you have non-technical people committing code, how do you review that? How do you guys do code reviews?

Speaker 2

We do code reviews, but we think of it as optional. I mean, for most, my view is like code reviews in large part is people in many cases trying to just escape the accountability of merging things into production. And if you have that, like, you know, if you have that culture, then to me, that's a sign that you need to invest way more in CD and CI and things like that, or CI in particular, but also CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment. We do code reviews. I mean, when I write code, occasionally, I'm asking authors, is this in line with how you think about things? I hope I'm not changing the architecture fundamentally. But we also make it clear internally that code reviews are quite optional. And if you're just changing docs, if you're just doing some basic stuff, don't wait for a human to look at it, especially in the era of AI. Why do you need a human to look at every piece of code? You don't have to. But that does require you to have very good controls internally around testing things. Yeah, and exactly. Infra…

Speaker 1

do you guys use like frontier models for coding or do you guys have you guys experimented with uh like the open source ones

Speaker 2

we experiment with everything but yeah i mean you know initially it was a lot of cursor then you know of course clawed and codex and now a lot of people are using you know night shift and all this open source stuff or other stacks so i don't necessarily have like a strong point of view like i want…

Speaker 1

something i read maybe like i don't know a year ago maybe like two years ago you were saying that you didn't think that there was going to be like a big on-prem business for you guys um have you maybe like changed your opinion on that

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