There's a popular take right now that the AI coding bottleneck has moved to code review. Models write code faster than humans can read it, so the senior engineer becomes the reviewer of last resort.
The take is half right. The bottleneck moved, yes. Not to code review. Upstream of it, to the spec.
When the AI is fast enough that scaffolding, validation, and boilerplate are basically free, what determines whether the feature is correct is not the code. It's the intent the code was generated from.
If the intent says "webhook handler that updates payment status," the AI builds the happy path beautifully and silently ignores duplicate delivery, idempotency, and the impossible state transitions. The bug was authored at spec time. The reviewer at code time can catch it, but they're catching an artifact of an upstream mistake. That work is slow, expensive, and demoralizing.
So the real question is how to review the spec.
