Quo Vadis, Code Review? Exploring the Future of Code Review

Code review has long been a core practice in collaborative software engineering, yet its future trajectory is unclear. In this research, we examine how professional developers experience code review today and what changes they anticipate in the next five years. We conducted a survey with 100 developers from five software-driven companies, capturing current review effort, reviewed artifacts, and expectations about future practice. Practitioners expect code review to remain essential, with similar or greater effort and a broader range of artifacts under review. At the same time, almost all expect LLMs to become active participants in code review. With this new participant in code review, we see long-term risks of eroding human understanding, accountability, and trust. Code review may therefore act as a lens through which the challenges of AI in software engineering become visible first.