The end of LGTM.

Code review used to be the place a senior engineer slowed down and looked. It was slow on purpose. It was the part of the pipeline that asked one question — does a person, not a process, think this should ship.

For thirty years that question got answered honestly because writing code was the bottleneck. Reviewing the diff took less time than producing it. The economics held.

They don't hold anymore. Code is now the cheap part. A thousand lines of plausible TypeScript can be generated in the time it takes to make coffee. The diff outpaces the reader.

The honest response is to read more carefully, not less. The actual response, the one happening right now in every team that has adopted AI assistants, is to approve faster. The bar drops to meet the volume.

That is the part Read PR refuses to accept.

We think review still has to be done by a human, with eyes on the file, for an amount of time that scales with the size of what changed. We think that fact should be measurable, because everything else in software delivery is. And we think the result of that measurement belongs on the PR — not in a separate compliance dashboard, not in a quarterly survey, but right next to the green checkmark.

That is the entire product. A required CI check that turns green when a person has actually read the diff. No AI summaries. No auto-approval. No suggestions. The reviewer reads, and the world gets to see they did.

We are designing this for the senior engineer who is tired of being the only person on the team who still opens the file. We are building it for the tech lead who wants approval to mean something again without having to make it a conversation. We are building it for the security lead who needs an audit trail that isn't a screenshot.

What we won't do.

• — Read the code for you. That's the human's job.
• — Track keystrokes, mouse paths, screen contents, or anything that is not dwell time on a file.
• — Frame this as catching anyone. Reviewers prove they read it. They never get caught.
• — Hide behind a “Contact sales” wall. Pricing is on the page. Public repos are free.

What we will do.

• — Open source the extension so anyone can audit what it sends.
• — Publish a real changelog. Ship the things on it.
• — Treat your repo like a workplace, not a data source. We track reading, not readers.

Real review, on the record.
— The Read PR team