Disclosure: I maintain PatchWitness, the open-source project used in the reproducible example below.
Coding agents have changed the economics of software modification. Work that once occupied an engineer for an afternoon can now produce a plausible patch in minutes. That is a real advance—but it also moves the bottleneck.
The scarce resource is increasingly the reviewer’s ability to establish:
what actually changed;
whether the patch stayed inside its intended scope;






