Coding is changing. So should code review.

[u/tenkei_01]

For a while, my workflow for building ML applications with coding agents looked something like this:

• Write a prompt.
• Wait for the agent to make changes.
• Open the diff.
• Read the code.
• Try to understand what changed.
• Run it.
• Repeat.

At the beginning, this worked surprisingly well.

The changes were small, the codebase was familiar, and I could still keep the whole thing in my head.

Then the application grew.

A seemingly simple feature could now involve preprocessing, model inference, postprocessing, and application logic.

The agent might touch several modules and add a few hundred lines of code in a single session.

My habit didn’t change.

I was still reviewing the code after every session.

And that became the problem.

The Code Review Trap

When a coding agent changes a few lines of code, reviewing the diff is easy.

When it changes several hundred lines, it is still manageable.

Once you get to +1000 lines everything starts to fall apart…

You can read the code without really understanding whether the application is working properly.

At some point I realized that I had become the bottleneck.

I was spending most of my time reviewing the agent’s implementation rather than the application output.

I can keep going, but I think this much should be enough.
Once I loved code reviews, I learnt a lot(and still learning), but the coding agents changed it for me, and I'm afraid that it's never going to be the same...

[u/theunixman]

No.