Code Reviews Still Matter in the AI Era, But the Process Needs Rethinking

As coding agents grow capable of writing, testing, and refactoring entire features autonomously, the traditional assumption that a human engineer authored the code is increasingly unreliable. A software engineer writing on DEV Community argues that code review remains essential — arguably more so — but that its underlying purpose must be reexamined. The conventional model, where one engineer writes code and another reviews it before merging, was designed to catch bugs, question design decisions, and build shared team ownership. In an agentic workflow, the engineer opening a pull request may have spent their time directing and reviewing an AI agent rather than writing code directly, raising questions about what a second human review actually adds. The author contends that approval counts can become a hollow proxy for quality, and that the meaningful act of verification is the engineer genuinely understanding and taking ownership of the change — regardless of whether a human or an AI produced it.