If the answer were as simple as “finding defects,” then a fully automated review starts to sound inevitable (and appealing).
But if code review was also how teams shared knowledge, built collective ownership, spread architectural understanding, and taught junior engineers how experienced developers think, then the answer becomes much less obvious.
That’s the mistake I think many organizations are about to make, and the reason we need to rethink what code review is actually for.
A large part of code review has been preventing people from doing stupid shit. AI is making stupid shit worse. It’s not defects, it’s “adding a whole micro service to get the user name from the ID, when the name is already in the metadata” or whatever that recent meme was.
Or that time a guy wrote a whole DSL instead of using the existing framework. Technically impressive, but adds a huge burden.