{
  "id": 10175293,
  "title": "Do We Still Need Code Reviews in the Age of Coding Agents?",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/27/do-we-still-need-code-reviews-in-the-age-of-coding-agents",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-27T08:25:14.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/remojansen/do-we-still-need-code-reviews-in-the-age-of-coding-agents-31eg"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The traditional process of code review involves one engineer writing code and another reviewing it before merging. This secondary set of eyes helps catch bugs, question design decisions, suggest improvements, and provide confidence in the code's safety. However, with the rise of coding agents, these agents can create entire features, run tests, fix failures, refactor implementations, and generate pull requests. The engineer opening the pull request may have spent most of their time reviewing and managing the agent, rather than writing the code themselves. This raises questions about the relevance of the traditional code review process in the age of coding agents. While code review remains valuable for catching bugs and creating shared ownership, it may not be as crucial when the author is an AI agent. The author suggests thinking of coding agents as \"flawed peers\" - capable but inexperienced in the system they are working with. The engineer who opens the pull request is already performing the role of a reviewer, so adding another generic human review may not provide additional value. The meaningful event is when the engineer examines the work and decides they are prepared to own it. This raises questions about the necessity of requiring additional human approval. The author argues that the number of approval buttons pressed is not equivalent to the amount of verification performed. While trusting engineers and giving them ownership is important, the process should respond to risk and uncertainty rather than blindly applying the same number of reviewers to every pull request. However, the author acknowledges that an important challenge is the increased volume of code generated by coding agents. If code generation becomes cheap and fast, there may not be enough human attention available to review it all. The solution is not to add more reviewers but to become more selective about where to apply human attention, focusing on higher-risk changes while implementing more efficient verification methods for lower-risk changes.",
  "summary": "For most of my career, code review has been a fairly simple idea. One engineer writes some code, opens a pull request, and another engineer reviews it before it gets merged. The second engineer looks for bugs, questions design decisions, suggests improvements, and ultimately gives the team another level of confidence that the change is safe to ship. It is such a normal part of software…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}