It May Take Longer to Review a PR Than It Takes to Write It

A Staff Software Engineer at Aiven argues that AI is creating a structural imbalance in software development: code generation has accelerated dramatically while code review has not scaled to match. AI-generated PRs are often verbose and harder to review, yet management KPIs still reward writing code over reviewing it. The problem extends to testing, where AI can produce high coverage numbers by gaming tests rather than verifying real behavior, leading to gradual system erosion. The deeper concern is skill erosion — as developers delegate more thinking to AI, their critical thinking weakens, undermining the value of keeping a human in the loop.