How GitHub Copilot Changed Code Review Culture (Not in the Way You’d Expect)

Remember when code reviews used to feel like sitting through a really awkward performance evaluation? You’d submit your PR, wait nervously, and then get hit with a wall of comments about everything from missing semicolons to philosophical debates about variable naming. Well, GitHub Copilot was supposed to make our lives easier by writing code for us. And it did. But something weird happened along the way that nobody really saw coming.

The thing about Copilot isn’t just that it autocompletes your code. It fundamentally changed what we argue about in code reviews.

The Unexpected Shift: From “What” to “Why”

When Copilot launched in 2021, everyone focused on the productivity gains. GitHub’s own research showed developers coding 55% faster with it. Cool, right? But here’s what’s interesting: research found that 85% of developers felt more confident in their code quality when authoring code with GitHub Copilot, and code reviews were more actionable and completed 15% faster.

But that’s not the cultural shift I’m talking about.

I’ve been using Copilot for about two years now, and I’ve noticed something in my team’s PRs. We used to spend review time catching syntax errors, pointing out missing…