Do you even need human review?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn8h5Ip-L9c
Matt Pocock · 2026-07-20 · 1 min · 25 sentences · sentence-level transcript from YouTube's caption track; each line begins at the time shown

[00:00] Everyone's obsessed with automating work with engineers.
[00:02] And the way you do it best is to figure out where you need human review.
[00:07] Let's say you have a process that looks like this.
[00:09] Imagine totally pre-AI where maybe you plan some work and then you ship some work and then maybe you review some work.
[00:17] And all of these checkpoints, all of the moments where you check the work, these are all human.
[00:22] A lot of people's dream, I think, is to have these all translated over to AI at once.
[00:27] But for me, that doesn't really make sense.
[00:29] On very large pieces of work, you probably want to align with the AI first.
[00:33] In other words, you want to be involved at the initial planning stage.
[00:37] That's what my skills like Grill Me and Grill with Docs and Wayfinder all do.
[00:40] And then you probably also want some human review right at the end before you ship it to production.
[00:45] However, there are some situations where you don't need that much human review at the end because maybe it's just a refactor, just an internal documentation rename.
[00:53] Maybe the human can just align early on, basically consider that the plan is done, and then the AI can ship it all the way to prod.
[01:00] That is good for some cases.
[01:02] There are also some cases where you can just specify the work that needs doing in like a single prompt, not bother really aligning with the AI, not bother grilling,
[01:09] and just let it ship through the process, and then just review it before it goes live.
[01:14] That can be really effective for very simple changes, very small diffs, stuff that's not going to make a big splash or a big impact, you know, just changing the color of a button or changing the name of a title or something.
[01:24] Even things like fix a small bug here that's just a couple of lines change, you should probably shift that checkpoint to the right.
[01:31] And that's the right language to use here.
[01:33] You shift checkpoints left for big work, for stuff you need to align on first, and you can shift it to the right for small work.
[01:40] The reason for that is that the smaller the diff, the easier it is to totally regenerate the code and hold it all in context.
[01:46] So, if you have really massive work, you want to align beforehand because fixing it is really expensive when you get to a later stage.
[01:53] So, that's the theory.
[01:54] For big work, you shift the review left.
[01:56] For small work, you shift the review right.