Code review was invented for a world in which a human wrote each diff, slowly, and another human read it, also slowly. The ratio held. Reviewers could plausibly read every line of every change without becoming the bottleneck. The practice scaled because both sides scaled at roughly the same rate.
Agents break the ratio. The author writes faster than the reviewer can read. If the reviewer's practice does not change, one of two things happens: the reviewer becomes the bottleneck and the agent's throughput is wasted, or the reviewer keeps the cadence and starts rubber-stamping. Most teams quietly choose option two and pretend they chose option one.
This is fixable. But it requires admitting that the review practice itself has to change.
What code review is actually for
Strip code review down and it serves a small number of real purposes: catching bugs the author missed, verifying the change does what the PR description claims, sharing knowledge across the team, enforcing standards the tools cannot, and holding contributors to a baseline of care.
