Anyone else notice a certain class of long-tenured, well-connected engineers getting real quiet lately?
You know the ones. Own half the repos “by history.” Camp in approvals and support channels. Block merge requests from new or non-influential engineers for reasons:
• “I don’t like this pattern.”
• “We usually don’t do it this way.”
• “This feels risky.”
They’d always offer “alternatives,” but mostly superficial ones — renames, style rewrites, or busywork that adds no value and exists mainly to assert dominance.
Then AI entered code review.
Now:
• Reviews focus on correctness, not preferences.
• Style nitpicks don’t block shipping.
• Social connections don’t matter.
• Tests and results do.
Suddenly, the gatekeepers can’t bully through approvals or code owner lists, and new engineers actually get to ship if they do good work.
Watching support-channel emperors lose authority to an LLM that doesn’t care about tenure is oddly satisfying.
Turns out removing politics from code reviews gives everyone a fair shot.