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

If you are good at code review, you will also be good at not using AI agents.

This. Having had the pleasure to review the work and fix the bugs of agent jockeys (generally capable developers that fell in love with Claude Code et al), I'm rather sceptical. The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever, like they weren't even involved, when I know they weren't completely hands off.

I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with these things, but all I've seen so far has been tragic.

Luckily, I've witnessed a few snap out of it and care again. Literally looks to me as if they had a substance abuse problem for a couple of months.

If you take a critical look at what comes out of contemporary agentic workflows, I think the conclusion must be that it's not there. So yeah, if you're a good reviewer, you would perhaps come to that conclusion much sooner.

Yeah.

I'm not even anti-LM. Little things—research, "write TS types for this object", search my codebase, go figure out exactly what line in the Django rest framework is causing this weird behavior, —are working great and saving me an hour here and 15m there.

It's really obvious when people lean on it, because they don't act like a beginner (trying things that might not work) or just being sloppy (where there's a logic ot it but there's no attention to detail), but it's like they copy pasted from Stackoverflow search results at random and there are pieces that might belong but the totality is incoherent.

It's also nice for handling some little tasks that otherwise would have been just annoying enough for me to not do it. Small 5 or 6 line functions that I would have had to fiddle with for far longer to get right.