Code Review After Code Gets Cheap
O'Reilly Radar, Friday, October 16th, 2026
Make evidence and blast radius conditions for accepting agent-generated code instead of reading every line.
Markus Eisele argues that reviewers have the same time they had before code generation became cheap, so reading every line limits throughput.
His approach is to agree on intended behavior and expected blast radius before implementation, then require evidence that shows drift and where direct inspection is needed.
In his example, an agent correctly adds refund approvals above 100 euros but also adds timeout retries to a shared payment client, which could issue duplicate refunds across all transactions even though the tests pass.
Treating blast radius as its own review criterion catches what line counts and passing tests miss.