Code review is not about catching bugs
The article discusses the role of code review in software development, emphasizing that it is not primarily about catching bugs. Instead, code review serves to determine whether a piece of code should be part of the product based on various judgment calls. The author argues that relying solely on human review for validation is flawed and that production observability is crucial for understanding system behavior.
- ▪Charity Majors argues that the real burden in software development is validation through production observability, not code review.
- ▪The article suggests that code review should focus on whether code aligns with product goals rather than just finding defects.
- ▪The author emphasizes that code review, testing, and observability each serve different but complementary purposes in the software development lifecycle.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Code Review Is Not About Catching Bugs Feb 23, 2026 My former Parse colleague Charity Majors – now CTO of Honeycomb and one of the strongest voices in the observability space – recently posted something that caught my attention. She’s frustrated with the discourse around AI-generated code shifting the bottleneck to code review, and she argues the real burden is validation – production observability. You don’t know if code works until it’s running with enough instrumentation to see what it’s actually doing. She followed up by endorsing Boris Tane’s piece arguing that the entire SDLC is collapsing, with monitoring as the only stage that survives.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at davidpoll.com.
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