Reviewer Fatigue: When Agents Write More Code Than Humans Can Read
· 15 min read
The Bottleneck Moved, and Most Teams Have Not Noticed
For decades, writing code was the expensive part. Reading it was almost free by comparison. A developer spent hours producing a change, and a reviewer spent minutes confirming it. That ratio shaped everything: our tools, our processes, our sense of who was busy and who was waiting.
Agents inverted that ratio. A capable agent now produces a complete branch with code, tests, and documentation in the time it takes to write a thoughtful task description. Authoring became cheap. Reading did not.
