Lint is green. The bot left forty comments about naming. Somebody typed LGTM. Then billing double-charged, or the migration locked the table, or the "internal" route was sitting on the public router.
If you have been reviewing AI-authored diffs for more than a month, you already know this shape. The model is fluent. The linter is happy. The PR description is a file list. The thing that will page you is not in the comments.
I stopped opening those PRs. Not because I am anti-agent — I use Cursor and Claude Code every day. I stopped because a review that cannot name a rollback is a vibe check with extra tokens.
This is the rubric I run before a PR exists. Eight blockers. If it is not one of these, stay quiet. Review bots that cry wolf get muted in a week, by me first.
What a blocker is
