Why AI made code review the new bottleneck, and the metric that spotted it | Newsela's Dee Wilcox

You can't automate a planning process that only some of your teams follow. This week on Dev Interrupted, Newsela CTO Dee Wilcox joins Dan Lines, LinearB's COO and co-founder in our AI Enablement interview series. She shows how Newsela brought dev cycle time down from four days to closer to two, and why she treats code review time as a measure of how long engineers wait for feedback. They close the conversation on proving AI ROI to the board, where Dan makes the case for cost per effective PR, a metric that only counts the PRs that ship without causing incidents or needing rework. Save your seat: What your software factory is doing to your engineersFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Learn more about Newsela: https://newsela.comAccelerate Everyone: Dee's Substack on engineering leadership https://accelerateeveryone.substack.comConnect with Dee: LinkedInOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Before anyone reimagines the software lifecycle for agents, someone has to secure the place all that code lands. Entire CEO Thomas Dohmke, formerly CEO of GitHub, and Apiiro co-founder and CEO Idan Plotnik see the same problem from opposite ends of the pipeline: agents now write, review, test and deploy the code, and nobody reads it.This week on Dev Interrupted, they join Andrew to argue that the fix is context, injected before the prompt through hooks and captured afterward as session logs committed next to the code. Idan puts numbers on the perfect storm of agents shipping more code as Mythos scans surface 10x the vulnerabilities, while Thomas makes the case that code is the what and the session log is the why. They close the conversation on why every pull request needs a business owner, not just a code owner. Save your seat: Sustaining engineering health through your AI transformationFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Entire: https://entire.io/Entire CLI (open source): https://github.com/entireio/cliApiiro: https://apiiro.com/Apiiro Guardian Agent: https://apiiro.com/blog/introducing-apiiro-guardian-agent/JPMorgan's Patchmageddon report: https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/nam/en/insights/latest-and-featured/eotm/patchmageddonConnect with Thomas: LinkedIn | Twitter/XConnect with Idan: LinkedInOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Your data warehouse still thinks a human is on the other end of the query. That's a problem MotherDuck CEO and co-founder Jordan Tigani knows from the inside, having spent years as a founding engineer on Google BigQuery. This week on Dev Interrupted, he joins Andrew to make the case that one warehouse per agent beats the distributed systems he used to work on. He lays out Watertown, his riff on Steve Yegge's Gastown that recasts the data engineer as the manager of a fleet of agents, and walks through how MotherDuck's Flights, Dives, and just-launched Guides keep pipelines, visualizations, and business context as code reviewed in GitHub. Get the guide: Your software factory needs a context layerFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:MotherDuck: The DuckDB-powered data warehouse built for small data and agents at motherduck.comWater-Town: Read Jordan's take on the agent swarm data stack, his riff on Gastown, at motherduck.com/blogFlights: Learn how MotherDuck turns data ingest into scheduled Python scripts your agents can write at motherduck.com/blogDives: See how MotherDuck replaced its BI tool with LLM-written TypeScript visualizations at motherduck.com/blogGuides: Read the docs on MotherDuck's new Markdown context layer for agents at motherduck.com/docsMotherDuck Blog: Keep up with all things MotherDuck at motherduck.com/blogMotherDuck Community: Join the community Slack at community.motherduck.comConnect with Jordan: LinkedIn | XOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

This week on the Friday Deploy, Andrew is joined by Dev Interrupted's producer Adam Noble to size up OpenAI's declaration that the AGI era has arrived, the Navier-Stokes race that has the math world crying foul, and why Meta is ditching its own messaging stack for Slack. They also dissect the bizarre saga of OpenAI's sandboxed agents leaving whispered notes for their future selves, and the "super dark factory." Finally, they celebrate Kiro Pro going free for over a million college students and tease a terminal-first upcoming news segment. Get the guide: The AI engineering productivity gap - how elite teams pull ahead in 2026Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:The Era of AGIA Bad Day For Humans, a Worse Day For HumanityMeta is switching to Slack because it says it's better for AI agentsAgency and AgentsThe Superdark FactorySpec-Driven Development for Agentic Software Engineering: Harnessing Human-Agent TeamworkInside Dev Interrupted’s agentic newsroom and what it reveals about the future of tech mediaKiro Pro for students: kiro.dev/students OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

If your AI agents are starving for accurate context, or breaking production because they have way too much access, you are officially in the middle of the data ingestion crisis. This week, Airbyte CEO and co-founder Michel Tricot unpacks the massive data access and context sprawl challenges that are crippling AI workflows in production. He and Andrew dive into the critical need for strict data permissions, automated entity resolution, and why the transition to agentic workflows perfectly mirrors the paradigm-shifting migration from bare-metal servers to the cloud. Finally, Michel explains why obsessing over short-term AI ROI is a massive mistake, revealing how Airbyte measures true success with their internal automation project, Hydra.Get the guide: Your software factory needs a context layerFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Airbyte: Explore the open-source data integration platform powering AI context at airbyte.comAgent Blueprint: Read Michel Tricot's newsletter on building agentic data infrastructure on SubstackConnect with Michel: LinkedIn OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew unpack Nvidia's massive acquisition of Hugging Face and what it means for the future of localized models. They also explore the multiplayer updates in OpenClaw 2.0, how relentless AI scraper bots are overwhelming kernel.org, and how engineering leaders can continuously balance safe infrastructure investments against volatile technology bets. Finally, they discuss why a strong engineering culture remains the ultimate productivity hack and how autonomous agents will only amplify existing organizational dysfunction. Get the guide: The AI engineering productivity gap - how elite teams pull ahead in 2026Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging FaceTeaching Everyone to Fish for TokensOpenClaw 2.0, AccidentallyCreepy crawliesReject Change, SometimesGood Culture is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AIOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

In this special episode, Andrew hosts HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy, Warp Head of Product Engineering Aloke Desai, and LinearB COO Dan Lines. They debate why human ownership of pull requests remains nonnegotiable and how to implement "night vision" observability across automated workflows. The panel also explores why incident management is the final frontier for AI and how to get your team excited about building the factory instead of fighting it.Get the guide: Your software factory needs a context layerFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:1Password: Explore the enterprise password and identity platform at 1password.com1Password for Developers: Dive into the new developer tooling, credential brokering, and secure AI workflows at 1password.devOracle Red Bull Racing: Read more about the F1 team's systems engineering at redbullracing.comConnect with Nancy: LinkedIn OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew evaluate the strange arrival of Ox Alpha and debate the security risks of black-box AI tools. They also explore why engineering trust is more critical than ever, revisit the controversial lines of code metric in the age of AI generation, and explain why autonomous agents need structured fences rather than restrictive sandboxes. Finally, they break down the multi-agent graph architectures powering modern software factories and share actionable advice for reaching staff engineer status by driving cross-team AI adoption. Get the guide: The AI engineering productivity gap - how elite teams pull ahead in 2026Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:Ox alphaFundamentals of Trust in EngineeringConceptual integrity and counting lines of codeGraph Engineering: The Complete Guide to Building Multi-Agent AI SystemsFences, not SandboxesHow to Grow From Senior to Staff Engineer in the AI EraOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

What happens when your autonomous coding agents need to navigate your core infrastructure? Do you hand them the keys and hope for the best? (gulp!) This week on Dev Interrupted, 1Password CTO Nancy Wang teaches the golden path for agentic security: just-in-time secrets that grants AI "access without custody." She also shares her CTO playbook for measuring true agentic ROI beyond raw PR volume, explains why 1Password has officially replaced traditional coding interviews with agent builder tests, and confesses she’s shipping PRs again with her own fleet of agents between meetings. Like many CTOs we’ve had on the show, Nancy reminds us that code is cheap now, and review is what’s expensive now. We get into tactics for addressing that bottleneck.Get the guide: The AI engineering productivity gap - how elite teams pull ahead in 2026Register: Dev Interrupted Presents: The Software Factory RoundtableFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:1Password: Explore the enterprise password and identity platform at 1password.com1Password for Developers: Dive into the new developer tooling, credential brokering, and secure AI workflows at 1password.devOracle Red Bull Racing: Read more about the F1 team's systems engineering at redbullracing.comConnect with Nancy: LinkedIn OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

When an AI can write 90 percent of a codebase in minutes, why is finishing the project harder than ever? This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew explore the recent string of GitHub outages and why the surge in autonomous agents is forcing teams to rethink where they host their code. They once again dive into the emerging trend of software factories, breaking down how engineering leaders are turning chaotic AI pull requests into streamlined assembly lines. Finally, they share tactical advice for "landing the plane" and pushing past scope creep to deliver the grueling final fraction of any major initiative. Register: Dev Interrupted Presents: The Software Factory RoundtableFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:Incident Report for GitHubCursor launches Origin code hosting platform as GitHub outage exposes opening in AI coding raceAsk HN: Alternatives to GitHubEveryone building a software factory wants the same proofIntroducing Warp FactoriesLanding the planeOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.