Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code
Thoughtworks CTO Rachel Laycock argues that the software industry relies too heavily on code review to solve cultural and architectural problems. She suggests that AI-driven code generation necessitates a shift toward earlier collaboration and knowledge sharing rather than relying on pull requests.
Why it matters
As AI increases code volume, traditional manual review processes are becoming bottlenecks, forcing engineering teams to rethink how they maintain quality and team cohesion.
I'm Rachel Laycock, CTO at Thoughtworks. I'm endlessly curious about how technology is changing the way we build software, lead teams and run businesses. This is where I capture ideas before they're fully formed, challenge my own thinking and occasionally wander off on interesting tangents.
TL;DR Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems
I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code Remix, hosted by Moderne. It was one of the more interesting panels I’ve done, largely because we disagreed. As my colleague Martin Fowler says, panels are much more interesting when people disagree and both sides have a good argument. Brian and I definitely did.
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