Is Code Review becoming a total bottleneck in your team, or is AI making it worse?
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As teams ship faster with AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), the volume of PRs has skyrocketed. But the time engineers spend reviewing code hasn't scaled at all.
I've seen two sides to this lately:
Teams where PRs sit in queue for 2–3 days, creating a massive pipeline bottleneck.
Teams trying AI reviewers, but ending up with automated spam comments that nobody reads.
I’m curious how your team handles this:
Is code review currently a major bottleneck for you?
Have you tried AI-assisted review tools, and did they actually save time or just add noise?
Where do you draw the line between human judgment and automation?
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The bottleneck usually isn't the review itself, it's that review is where everyone's context stops. We had PRs sitting two days not because people were slow but because nobody owned the queue. AI reviewers help most on the mechanical stuff, style, obvious bugs, missing tests. The judgment calls still need a person who knows why the change exists.