[Paper] The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection

Source: arXiv - 2606.13175v1

Overview

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.

Key Contributions

This paper presents research in the following areas:

• cs.SE

Methodology

Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.

Practical Implications

This research contributes to the advancement of cs.SE.

Authors

• Martin Monperrus

Paper Information

• arXiv ID: 2606.13175v1
• Categories: cs.SE
• Published: June 11, 2026
• PDF: Download PDF