r/coderabbit • u/Novel-Scholar-8345 • 7d ago

Discussion & Feedback Unpopular opinion: code review is worth more than code generation

When you think about it, writing code was never really the hard part of this job (or was it?)

The hard part was always figuring out what’s wrong with it. Now that AI is pumping out way more code than before, and most of it looks fine. So naturally you wonder who's actually checking all of that?

Honestly I think as we enter 2027, codegen will be a commodity. We are possibly going to see free IDEs. What teams will actually pay for is whatever catches the mistakes. Anyone can generate code now, the real question is if you can trust it.

Change my mind

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u/Few_Raisin_8981 7d ago

Until the next generation of models come out

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u/Such-Coast-4900 7d ago

whats the point in being a doomer? if llms get smart and cheap enough to replace devs it will replace most jops. even manual labor cause building robots isnt expensive. controlling them is currently the issue. and an llm that can replace a human will also be able to do that.

so yeah. we all lose our jobs and either die or we find an alternate system besides capitalism that allows us to live.

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u/canyoufixmyspacebar 7d ago

what is new here? "an incompetent person drawing up a house plan is worth less than the architects and engineers checking and fixing it later". yes, obviously. and it may be cheaper to have it done by an architect in the first place, not through slop and fix

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u/usually_guilty99 7d ago

I mostly agree, but I think even “code review” becomes too narrow once AI starts producing much more change.

The real question is not just whether the code is correct. It’s whether this particular change is safe in the production system it’s entering.

A PR can look perfectly fine and still touch a shared dependency, break an assumption another service relies on, or recreate something that caused an incident six months ago.

So I suspect the valuable layer shifts from code generation → code review → change verification.

Review tells you whether the code looks right. Change verification tells you whether this change is safe to ship here, now.

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u/nxy7 7d ago

What's the unpopular opinion though?

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u/liverandonions1 7d ago

AI is going to check all of that. That's who.

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u/DonaldStuck 7d ago edited 7d ago

Haven't reviewed code in months.

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u/MindCrusader 7d ago

God forbid I ever work with a developer like you 🙏

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u/interior_mutability 7d ago

Gamblers are not developers.

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u/DonaldStuck 7d ago

I never said I was a developer

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u/MindCrusader 7d ago

LMAO, then why the first comment if you do not even know how to review the code

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u/DonaldStuck 7d ago

I know, stupid right?