Article
Managing review when coding agents outpace it
The pressure point appears when agents can produce changes faster than people can inspect them. This article starts there and works back through task definition, isolated execution and the merge controls needed to keep review meaningful.
A review queue can fill with technically plausible pull requests long before a team has worked out how to inspect them. Each change may have tests, a tidy description and an agent transcript. The reviewer still has to understand the requirement, judge the design, inspect the changed behaviour and decide whether the evidence is trustworthy.
When agents start implementation jobs faster than reviewers finish existing ones, changes wait, conflict or get discarded. Reviewers also lose time switching between unrelated parts of the system. Plan from the rate at which the team can accept verified changes, then limit implementation work to match it.