Teams

AI Code Review: The Hidden Bottleneck Nobody's Talking About

Here’s a problem that’s creeping up on engineering teams: AI tools are dramatically increasing the volume of code being produced, but they haven’t done anything to increase code review capacity. The bottleneck has shifted.

Where teams once spent the bulk of their time writing code, they now spend increasing time reviewing code—much of it AI-generated. And reviewing AI-generated code is harder than reviewing human-written code in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

From Code Writer to AI Orchestrator: The Changing Developer Role

There’s a narrative circulating in tech circles: developers are evolving from “code writers” to “AI orchestrators.” The story goes that instead of typing code ourselves, we’ll direct AI agents that write code for us. Our job becomes coordination, review, and high-level direction rather than implementation.

It’s a compelling vision. It’s also significantly oversimplified.

Research shows that developers can currently “fully delegate” only 0-20% of tasks to AI. That’s not nothing, but it’s far from the wholesale transformation some predict. The reality of how developer roles are changing is more nuanced—and more interesting—than the hype suggests.

The 32% Problem: Why Most Engineering Orgs Are Flying Blind on AI Governance

Here’s a statistic that should concern every engineering leader: only 32% of organizations have formal AI governance policies for their engineering teams. Another 41% rely on informal guidelines, and 27% have no governance at all.

Meanwhile, 91% of engineering leaders report that AI has improved developer velocity and code quality. But here’s the kicker: only 25% of them have actual data to support that claim.

We’re flying blind. Most organizations have adopted AI tools without the instrumentation to know whether they’re helping or hurting, and without the policies to manage the risks they introduce.

Always Use Automated Integration Testing

QA or Quality Assurance of a software project is often the area of software development that is most neglected. Typically developers avoid software testing like their lives depended on it. While a basic level of testing is required for a single scenario to validate that your code “works”, the level of testing that is required to ensure that all users have a good user experience across all targeted platforms is something that a developer seems to think is beneath them.

Micromanagement Ruins Teams

It seems that the management thinking these days is that managers should empower their employees to make decisions and implement the actions behind these decisions. This works great when you have a team and management that has mutual trust with a mutual goal. However, when the manager does not trust the members of the team, or thinks that they have to be the one to make every decision or have input into every task, the empowerment disappears.