Code review has always been a time sink. AI just makes the dysfunction undeniable.
Luca Rossi, founder of Refactoring.fm and builder of the open source tool Tolaria, has been running one of engineering's most-read newsletters for five years, with over 170,000 subscribers. He's also been doing what a lot of engineering leaders talk about but rarely do: building a real product with AI agents to pressure-test what's actually possible today.
In this conversation, Rob and Luca dig into the state of AI adoption at the midpoint of 2026; what high-performing teams are getting right, why most orgs are still just bolting AI onto a broken process, and why code review was already a questionable practice before AI came along. Luca also walks through the "guides, gates, and guards" framework he uses to keep AI agents productive and honest on Tolaria: the instructions that steer agent behavior, the deterministic hooks that catch what agents ignore, and the nightly reflection loops that catch the rest.
Luca is the founder of Refactoring.fm, a newsletter and community covering software engineering and engineering leadership. He spent a decade as a CTO and startup founder before going independent, and now builds in public as both a writer and a solo product builder.
In this episode:
Why adopting AI without fixing your process just means moving faster in the wrong direction
What the most mature engineering teams are doing differently in 2026
The guides, gates, and guards framework for AI-assisted development
Why Luca has been a code review skeptic since before the AI era
How building Tolaria became a way to get ground truth about what AI agents can actually do
The unexpected differences between running a startup and running an independent content business
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