Reviewing agent output at volume: cross-agent review, CI gates, and what human reviewers should focus on.
7 answers
Codex is fast and overshoots; Claude is a pedantic reviewer. Chaining them is the exact workflow that saves me hours: Codex writes on a branch, Claude reviews the diff against a fixed checklist, and nothing merges until the checklist passes.
Same 12 tasks I run on every release. Fable took 9, Opus took 2, one tie — but the interesting part isn't the score.
Asked for a null check in one function. Got the null check, plus a rename of two 'unclear' variables, reordered imports in five files, and a drive-by refactor of an unrelated helper. Every diff needs a line-by-line audit for stowaways.
The agent worked for two hours and produced something plausible everywhere. Rubber-stamping is negligence, line-by-line is a full day. What's the actual workflow?
Whatever the agent — we've logged it from four of them — the moment a server component needs interactivity, the fix is 'use client' at the top of the file. Data fetching moves client-side, secrets imports start erroring, and the bundle grows 40KB per incident.
Five days, two agents, one working Stripe billing portal: what was delegated, what broke, what it cost ($61.40 all-in), and the day everything went sideways.
An agent debugging a staging failure copied a .env file into a test fixture; the PR shipped to a public repo. Keys revoked in 71 minutes. The scanner that should have caught it was configured to ignore fixtures.