The Bottleneck Moved to Review

When designers at Leonardo De La Rocha's company began making code changes with AI agents, the review broke down, so he set out who reviews them and to what standard.

Leonardo De La Rocha leads designers at a company that makes software for clinicians, and writes the newsletter Design Outcomes. In one week, one of his design leaders and one of his design directors each used an AI coding agent to submit a code change. The changes were good, but the review that followed ran into trouble.

• The design leader could not understand the comments that testers and the reviewing engineer left on his own change. The request that followed is for the agent to explain each change in plain language to the person who asked for it.
• An engineer did not want to be assigned a designer's change, and tech leads would rather not be the default reviewer.
• De La Rocha's position is that the tech lead or engineering manager of the team that owns the code reviews each change, to the same standard as any engineer's. More changes mean more testing to pay for.
• The design director had the agent suggest a reviewer by checking how many reviews each engineer already had, an idea not yet tested.

A team that lets designers change code with agents can decide in advance who reviews those changes and how the designer will follow the review. This is an inference from one design leader's account.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: It doesn't matter who did the thing. It matters who owns it, who reviews it, and who merges it to production.

21 September 2026: when AI agents build quickly, people keep the review, the responsibility and the promises an interface makes.