Treat code reviews like a system to be automated. Tally every piece of feedback you give in a spreadsheet. Once a specific comment appears a few times, write a custom lint rule to automate that check for everyone. This scales your impact and frees you up for higher-level feedback.
As AI coding agents generate vast amounts of code, the most tedious part of a developer's job shifts from writing code to reviewing it. This creates a new product opportunity: building tools that help developers validate and build confidence in AI-written code, making the review process less of a chore.
Don't ask an LLM to perform initial error analysis; it lacks the product context to spot subtle failures. Instead, have a human expert write detailed, freeform notes ("open codes"). Then, leverage an LLM's strength in synthesis to automatically categorize those hundreds of human-written notes into actionable failure themes ("axial codes").
Simply deploying AI to write code faster doesn't increase end-to-end velocity. It creates a new bottleneck where human engineers are overwhelmed with reviewing a flood of AI-generated code. To truly benefit, companies must also automate verification and validation processes.
Solo developers can integrate AI tools like BugBot with GitHub to automatically review pull requests. These specialized AIs are trained to find security vulnerabilities and bugs that a solo builder might miss, providing a crucial safety net and peace of mind.
Don't let performance reviews sit in a folder. Upload your official review and peer feedback into a custom GPT to create a personal improvement coach. You can then reference it when working on new projects, asking it to check for your known blind spots and ensure you're actively addressing the feedback.
To maximize an AI agent's effectiveness, establish foundational software engineering practices like typed languages, linters, and tests. These tools provide the necessary context and feedback loops for the AI to identify, understand, and correct its own mistakes, making it more resilient.
As AI writes most of the code, the highest-leverage human activity will shift from reviewing pull requests to reviewing the AI's research and implementation plans. Collaborating on the plan provides a narrative journey of the upcoming changes, allowing for high-level course correction before hundreds of lines of bad code are ever generated.
When an AI model makes the same undesirable output two or three times, treat it as a signal. Create a custom rule or prompt instruction that explicitly codifies the desired behavior. This trains the AI to avoid that specific mistake in the future, improving consistency over time.
Instead of fighting for perfect code upfront, accept that AI assistants can generate verbose code. Build a dedicated "refactoring" phase into your process, using AI with specific rules to clean up and restructure the initial output. This allows you to actively manage technical debt created by AI-powered speed.
It's infeasible for humans to manually review thousands of lines of AI-generated code. The abstraction of review is moving up the stack. Instead of checking syntax, developers will validate high-level plans, two-sentence summaries, and behavioral outcomes in a testing environment.