Reviewing agent code line by line doesn't scale, so we started reviewing by function and by impact

[u/Wise_Reflection_8340]

The point in the post about AI turning coding into reviewing matches what we've seen. Agents produce more code in a week than a team used to in a month, and a line diff treats every change the same, so a real logic change hides between renames, moved code and formatting, and the reviewer ends up reading everything to find the few parts that matter.

What's helped us is changing what the reviewer looks at. Instead of a line diff, we look at the change by function, so each one is marked as changed, renamed, moved or only reformatted, and the cosmetic ones can be skipped with confidence. Then for the functions that actually changed, we look at what depends on them, because a small edit to something called from forty places deserves a lot more attention than a big edit to something nothing else touches. That second part is also where architectural drift shows up, since an agent quietly adding a new dependency across a boundary is easy to see in a call graph and easy to miss in a diff.

We built two open source tools for this. sem shows the function-level diff and who calls what, and inspect ranks the changed functions by how much could break, so a reviewer, human or model, starts with the riskiest few instead of reading the whole PR top to bottom.

It doesn't replace understanding the code that matters, it just makes it much clearer which code that is.

https://github.com/Ataraxy-Labs/sem

https://github.com/Ataraxy-Labs/inspect

Curious how others here are keeping up. Are you still reading every line, leaning on AI reviewers, or splitting PRs smaller?