TL;DR: Code Reviews Break in the AI Era — Plans Fix Them

Source: Dev.to

TL;DR

AI makes writing code dramatically faster, but that speed quietly breaks code reviews.

The problem isn’t large diffs; the real problem is that reviewers no longer know where to start.

In AI‑assisted development, a plan is not a TODO list. A plan is:

• the unit of review (intent, scope, boundaries)
• the unit of generation (what AI should and should not change)
• the unit of knowledge (what gets promoted to docs later)

When plans are treated as first‑class artifacts and committed to the repo:

• Reviews start from intent, not diff scanning
• PR sizes shrink structurally
• Human reviews focus on judgment, not syntax
• AI reviews become intent‑aware
• Context window usage drops
• Future changes become cheaper

Plans are not documents; they are a process. If AI writes more code, humans must decide more clearly — and plans are how we do that.

👉 Read the full article: Why Plans Should Be First‑Class Artifacts in AI‑Assisted Development