The code review bug hunt is dead. Here’s what developers get wrong.

Code review is widely misunderstood as a bug-catching mechanism, but experts argue it was never well-suited for that purpose. Finding bugs by reading a diff is extremely difficult and largely luck-dependent — race conditions and runtime state issues are invisible in static code. The real value of code review lies in identifying code that will be hard to maintain, flagging overly complex change sets, and ensuring the next engineer can work on the code seamlessly. Tests catch bugs; production catches everything else. With AI-generated code becoming prevalent, the engineer's role is shifting further from writing code toward validating architecture, intent, and business logic — and even that may eventually be automated.