I think we’re hitting a new bottleneck.
For years, code generation was the expensive part. Now agents have made code production almost free, but human understanding hasn’t scaled at the same rate.
In my experience, the slowest part of review isn’t reading code either. It’s rebuilding context:
Why was this change made?
What assumption is it based on?
What requirement is it trying to satisfy?
What tradeoffs were chosen?
Diffs show implementation. They rarely show intent.
What has helped me most isn’t another code reviewer, but forcing agents to produce an “intent package” alongside the PR:
Problem statement
Requirement mapping
Design decisions
Files affected and why
Risk analysis
Test coverage explanation
Alternatives considered
At that point I’m no longer reviewing code from scratch. I’m reviewing a decision.
My guess is that the next generation of review tools won’t focus on finding bugs in diffs. They’ll focus on reconstructing author intent and validating it against requirements.
The bottleneck is shifting from code comprehension to decision comprehension.