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DP Dennis Pilarinos Dennis Pilarinos Is founder and CEO of Unblocked, a tool that gives engineering teams context-aware answers about their own codebase.

“PRs and review cycles were basically designed for humans who are producing code at human speed. And now it's agents that are producing code at agent speed, and it falls onto a human to try to manage that. That's unscalable.”

Refactoring · Software Engineering & Infra · September 2026

“PRs and review cycles were basically designed for humans who are producing code at human speed. And now it's agents that are producing code at agent speed, and it falls onto a human to try to manage that. That's unscalable.” — Dennis Pilarinos, Refactoring

Luca Rossi has just described the bind: agent-assisted review raises code quality but saves the human reviewer no time, so the reviewer stays the bottleneck. Pilarinos answers that the ritual itself is the mismatch, not the tooling around it. Rossi restates it back as producing at agent speed and reviewing at human speed.

Transcript

Refactoring
Dennis Pilarinos

…what's the blast radius for any potential code review. And depending on where it comes into that risk assessment, if it's low, let it go. Right. So if it's, yeah. So like you just have people who are only looking at the things that matter, right? The things that are important to go and look at.

Luca Rossi

…to do a review, they're not making me save a lot of time because I still have to go through the code, right? So I'm increasing quality, but I'm not increasing my own productivity in a way that is that meaningful. So chances are I'm still bottlenecked, you know, if the amount of PRs has grown a lot.

Dennis Pilarinos

Yeah, I mean, I think PRs and review cycles were basically designed for humans who are producing code at human speed. And now it's agents that are producing code at agent speed, and it falls onto a human to try to manage that. That's unscalable.

Luca Rossi

Yeah. Yeah. Basically, the mismatch is that we want to produce code at agent speed and review it at human speed. And obviously, something has to give here.

Dennis Pilarinos

Yeah. It kind of reminds me of like, I have this meme in my head of like a man standing on the other side of a machine, like the machine's, I don't know, spewing out widgets or what have you. And it kind of reminds me like a black and white, one of those things that you see on Instagram or the…

Luca Rossi

Yeah, that's probably, I'm thinking about software engineers juggling pies and it's probably a good picture versus for the current state of code reviews that it's very bad. So you mentioned code quality before. And of course, in all surveys and research, keeping code quality high and all the…

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