The code review, that sacred ritual of software engineering, is dying. Not because we've abandoned quality or stopped caring about our craft, but because the ground beneath it has fundamentally shifted. In the age of agentic AI, the pull request as we know it has become a bottleneck masquerading as a best practice.

What We Actually Got From Code Reviews

For decades, code reviews served multiple masters. They caught bugs before production. They spread knowledge across the team. They provided mentorship opportunities for junior engineers. They enforced consistency and shared standards. They created a paper trail of decisions and context.

These were genuine benefits that justified the friction. A day or two waiting for review seemed like a reasonable trade for the collective intelligence of your peers examining your work.

But look at that list again. Every single benefit has an AI-shaped hole in it.

The Supersession

AI coding assistants now catch bugs in real-time, before the code is even committed. They explain unfamiliar patterns and suggest improvements as you write. They enforce style guides and architectural conventions without human intervention. They generate documentation and provide context that previously lived only in reviewers' heads.

The mentorship angle is more nuanced, but consider: junior engineers learning from AI assistants get immediate, patient, infinitely available feedback. They can ask "stupid questions" without social cost. They can explore alternatives without waiting for a senior engineer's calendar to clear.

This isn't to say human mentorship has no value - it absolutely does. But the code review was always a poor vehicle for it. Reviewing someone's finished work is a terrible time to teach them. The decisions are already made, the code already written. Real mentorship happens in pairing sessions, architecture discussions, and retrospectives - not in GitHub comments.

The Speed Problem

Here's what code reviews can't solve in the agentic era: velocity.

When an AI agent can generate a working feature in minutes, having a human spend 30 minutes reviewing it creates an absurd ratio. When that same agent is producing dozens of changes per day, the review queue becomes a car park. Engineers spend more time context-switching between reviews than doing their own work.

The maths simply doesn't work. We're asking humans to be a synchronous checkpoint in an increasingly asynchronous, high-throughput system.

The Rebirth

So we kill the code review. And then we build something better in its place.

The new pull request isn't a gate waiting for human approval. It's a checkpoint that validates the change actually works. Comprehensive automated tests. Integration verification. Performance benchmarks. Security scans. All the things we always said we'd automate "someday" but never prioritised because human review was "good enough."

Human involvement doesn't disappear - it transforms. Instead of reviewing every change, engineers focus on reviewing systems. They examine test coverage and quality. They monitor production behaviour. They intervene when automated checks flag genuine concerns, not when arbitrary approval counts haven't been met.

Collaboration shifts too. Rather than asynchronous comment threads on finished work, teams invest in synchronous collaboration during development. Pair programming, mob sessions, and design reviews happen before code is written, when input actually shapes outcomes.

The Mechanism

This requires more than a mindset shift. It requires building mechanisms that make the new model safe.

Feature flags become mandatory, not optional. Canary deployments catch what tests miss. Observability investment pays dividends when you're shipping faster. Rollback capabilities need to be instant and reliable.

The safety net moves from "someone looked at this" to "we can detect and recover from problems quickly." This is a better safety net. Human reviewers miss things. Well-designed automated systems and rapid feedback loops catch issues that would slip through any review process.

The New Normal

Pull requests aren't going away. The mechanism of proposing, validating, and merging changes remains useful. What dies is the assumption that human review is the primary quality gate.

In its place: automated verification, continuous validation, and humans focused on the work that actually requires human judgment.

Pull requests are dead. Long live pull requests.