If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

Code review is part of the job, but one of the least enjoyable parts. Developers like _writing_ and that gives the most job satisfaction. AI tools are helpful, but inherently increases the amount of code we have to review with more scrutiny than my colleagues because of how unpredictable - yet convincing - it can be. Why did we create tools that do the fun part and increase the non-fun part? Where are the "code-review" agents at?

> Where are the "code-review" agents at?

OpenAI's Codex Cloud just added a new feature for code review, and their new GPT-5-Codex model has been specifically trained for code review: https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/

Gemini and Claude both have code review features that work via GitHub Actions: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review... and https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-actions

GitHub have their own version of this pattern too: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-04-04-copilot-code-review...

There are also a whole lot of dedicated code review startups like https://coderabbit.ai/ and https://www.greptile.com/ and https://www.qodo.ai/products/qodo-merge/

you can't use a system with the exact same hallucination problem to check the work of another one just like it. Snake oil

I don't think it's that simple.

Fundamentally, unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice, it just so happens that they're different enough that failure in one tends to reveal a bug in another.

You can't reasonably state this won't be the case with tools built for code review until the failure cases are examined.

Furthermore a simple way to help get around this is by writing code with one product while reviewing the code with another.

> unit tests are using the same system to write your invariants twice

For unit tests, the parts of the system that are the same are not under test, while the parts that are different are under test.

The problem with using AI to review AI is that what you're checking is the same as what you're checking it with. Checking the output of one LLM with another brand probably helps, but they may also have a lot of similarities, so it's not clear how much.