Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.
Refactoring · Software Engineering & Infra · September 2026
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.
…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.
…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.
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.
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.
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…
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…