A code review agent is an AI system that automatically reviews pull requests, checking for bugs, security vulnerabilities, style violations, and architectural issues before human review. Code review agents operate at the PR level, analyzing diffs and leaving inline comments similar to a human reviewer.
As AI code generation increases development velocity, the review bottleneck becomes more acute. Studies suggest reviewers lose effectiveness after 80 to 100 lines of code, and catching security vulnerabilities with 95% confidence requires 12 to 14 reviewers on the same change.
Code review agents address this by running at the same speed as code generation, maintaining consistent quality standards, and catching issues that human reviewers miss under time pressure.