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

This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be notorious for this). I don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.” Now, you would, of course, think that your boss had gone crazy. No-one would expect this to produce good results. But somehow, stick ‘AI’ on this scenario, and a lot of people start to think “hey, maybe that could work.”

That depends.

If the engineer, doing the implementation is top-shelf, you can get very good results from a “flawed” process (in quotes, because it’s not actually “bad.” It’s just a process that depends on the engineer being that particular one).

Silicon Valley is obsessed with process over people, manifesting “magical thinking” that a “perfect” process eliminates the need for good people.

I have found the truth to be in-between. I worked for a company that had overwhelming Process, but that process depended on good people, so it hired top graduates, and invested huge amounts of money and time into training and retention.