Code review is more than detection: John Allspaw pushes back on agent-driven replacement

John Allspaw of Adaptive Capacity Labs responds to a paper arguing coding agents can replace human code review. He says the paper reduces review to four automatable functions and misses what humans actually bring: genuine confusion as a signal, questioning whether a change is needed at all, noticing what is missing, calibrated scrutiny based on who wrote the code, and coactive knowledge-building. He also points out that reviewers carry operational context and personal accountability that agents lack. The post is a point-by-point rebuttal of the paper's framing; no quantitative experiments are presented.