Your team opens 50 AI-authored PRs a day. When do you trust the output, and how do you review that volume without becoming the bottleneck?
If you read every AI PR line by line, you become the throttle the assistant was meant to remove. The staff answer is a risk-tiered trust model: route by blast radius, let gates clear the low-risk volume, and spend human attention only where reversibility is low.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
If you read every AI PR line by line, you become the throttle the assistant was meant to remove. The staff answer is a risk-tiered trust model: route by blast radius, let gates clear the low-risk volume, and spend human attention only where reversibility is low.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
