The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection

View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Code review has been the primary quality gate in software development since Fagan formalised code inspection in 1976. For five decades, having a human examine and comment on a colleague's changes before merge has been a cornerstone practice at organisations of every size. Coding agents are large language model (LLM)-based autonomous systems capable of reading, writing, testing, and repairing software. We argue that coding agents have crossed a threshold of capability at which traditional human code review is no longer a necessary component of a software quality pipeline. Our argument rests on two claims: every stated goal of code review can be served by agents at lower cost and higher throughput; the naive integration in which agents write code and humans remain the mandatory reviewers is a dead end because it neither provides meaningful assurance nor scales with AI-assisted throughput.

Subjects: Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2606.13175 [cs.SE]   (or arXiv:2606.13175v1 [cs.SE] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13175 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Martin Monperrus [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:43:48 UTC (62 KB)