Engineering AI Generated Artifacts for Human Review

When AI writes at 10x speed, your review process becomes the bottleneck

You’re three hours into reviewing an AI-generated technical requirements doc. The architecture looks solid. The implementation plan is thorough. The code patterns are reasonable. But you can’t approve it.

Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s unexplained.

Why WebSockets instead of Server-Sent Events? Why Redis when the doc mentions “aligning with our infrastructure standards” but doesn’t link to them? You spend two hours hunting through Slack threads and old ADRs (Architectural Decision Records), reconstructing the reasoning the doc should have included in the first place.

By the end, you’ve spent more time reverse-engineering decisions than you would have spent making them yourself.

The AI generated code at 10x speed. You reviewed it at 0.1x speed. You lost.

The Review Bottleneck: When AI Writes Faster Than Humans Can Validate

AI writes faster than humans can review. This asymmetry isn’t just a capacity mismatch. It’s a fundamental shift in how code reaches production.

When AI generates artifacts in isolation, there’s no shared human experience in creating the doc. No meeting where trade-offs were debated, no design review where assumptions were validated. The artifact can’t rely on out-of-band context. It must stand alone, carrying not just conclusions but the full reasoning that led to them.

The challenge isn’t that AI lacks context. Modern AI can ingest your entire standards library, past decisions, and best practices. The challenge is that most teams don’t ask AI to expose that reasoning in the artifact for human reviewers.

This creates review friction at exactly the wrong time. As AI amplifies development velocity, the bottleneck shifts from writing code to validating it. Teams that don’t adapt spend their velocity gains on review overhead.

The 2025 DORA report confirms what many teams found: AI adoption correlates with increased instability when review processes can’t keep pace with generation speed.

The solution isn’t slower AI. It’s AI generated artifacts engineered for efficient human review.