· ai-devtools
How we review 4x more AI code without reading every line
Do you need to read every line of AI-generated code to trust it?
Instead, check five things: the intent behind a change, its acceptance criteria, the invariants it can't break, the decisions made along the way, and evidence that it works. At Aviator, that shift let the same nine engineers merge 4× more pull requests, cut median time to merge from 2.1 days to 3.4 hours, and drop reverts by 40%. A human still signs off on every PR.
What changed is what that human reads. "Decisions need a person, and a diff is the worst place to make them." We got the insight by sorting our own review comments.
Most of what a reviewer writes on a PR is either a rule they've written before or a decision. Machines should check rules every time. Decisions need a person, and a diff is the worst place to make them.
The problem: Code review doesn't scale with AI Our code flipped from human-written with AI help to AI-generated with human help. Weekly merged PRs went from about 100 to more than 400. Our median AI-generated PR reached 640 lines, well past 400 lines, widely considered the limit where bug detection falls off.
