Practice · 2024–now · AI Present
AI review bottleneck
Copilot ships PRs faster than teams can review. Generation outran ownership and security review — the real 2026 invoice.
Why AI review bottleneck stuck
The review bottleneck stuck because typing speed is not the scarce resource; verified ownership is. Tools that flood queues without matching review capacity create silent debt. The fad was celebrating throughput; the stuck practice is sizing review like on-call.
Case studies
Patterns
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Practice · 2021–now
AI pair programming
Coding agents that edit the repo — now table stakes. Generation outran review capacity; ownership is the bottleneck.
Practice · 2024–now
Vibe coding
Accept AI output on feel, skip the diff, hope tests exist. Fast demos; CVEs and nobody owns the middleware.
$ Ship-to-prod without reading the diff became a flex until incidents revealed nobody knew which prompt wrote the auth middleware. Review debt arrived in one weekend demo.
Practice · 2023–now
AI will rewrite the codebase
Big-bang rewrite, now with a chatbot — then with agents. Same failure mode; prettier slides.
$ Exec decks promised autonomous migrations "by next quarter," then rebranded as "agentic modernization." Teams that skipped tests, ownership, and incremental strangler patterns bought expensive demos and fragile diffs.
Practice · 2024–now
AI-generated test theater
Coverage theater with a chat box. Tests that mirror the bug and never catch it.
$ LLMs wrote tests that boosted coverage and asserted nothing. Green CI, false confidence — eval theater's cousin in the test suite.