A Brief History of Code Review (And What's Next)

JS Nation

JSNation 2026

Santosh Yadav

CLI, GUI, or Just Blind Trust? A Tour of Code Review Styles

React Summit

React Summit 2026

The Monorepo Multiplier: 10x Your Team with Better Architecture

TechLead Conference

TechLead Conf Amsterdam 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition

Web Engineering Summit

Web Engineering Summit 2026

We all review code differently. Some developers carefully read side-by-side diffs in the browser. Others refuse to leave the terminal and review purely via CLI. And let's be honest—sometimes we just click "LGTM" without looking at the code at all. In this talk, I will demo these different code review styles, explore why they all still lead to a "review bottleneck," and show how AI can speed up the process no matter which workflow you prefer.

Code review has come a long way. We’ve evolved from manual inspections and email patches to modern pull requests and automated testing. Yet, one big problem remains: developers are still stuck waiting on human approvals. Join me for a walk through the history of code review to see how our processes have adapted over the last 30 years. We'll examine the limits of our current workflows and explore how the new era of AI-assisted reviews is finally solving the code review bottleneck.

In this talk, we'll explore the compounding benefits of monorepo architectures through two lenses: Developer Experience (DX) and the emerging concept of Agentic Experience (AX).The Polyrepo Problem - Context switching tax - Dependency version hell - Inconsistent tooling - Why AI agents fail in fragmented codebases The Monorepo Solution - Unified context for humans and AI - Atomic changes across boundaries - Consistent patterns and practices - How AI tools become 10x more accurate