What Is Happening With Code Reviews?
The Pragmatic Engineer, Tuesday, September 8th, 2026
As AI generates more code than teams can read, review is splitting into AI-assisted, risk-based and schema-focused modes.
Code review practice is changing as AI generates more code than developers can track manually. The article covers the approaches teams are adopting: AI-assisted review that summarizes and flags rather than replacing human judgment, risk-based triage that routes changes by blast radius, and schema-focused review that concentrates attention on interfaces and data contracts where errors propagate.
It also returns to first principles about what code review is actually for, distinguishing defect detection from knowledge sharing and design feedback, which pull in different directions once volume rises.