My initial thoughts on Devin Review
Just came across the new Devin Review feature from Cognition Labs today and wanted to share some thoughts.
So the core idea here is pretty straightforward. As AI coding agents improve at writing code at speed, the new bottleneck is reviewing all that code. Devin Review is basically a free code review tool that makes GitHub PRs easier to comprehend.
Now to be clear, AI powered code review is nothing new. In fact, Cursor has it built in, Claude Code can review your diffs, GitHub Copilot does it, Codex has review capabilities, and there are probably a dozen other tools I am forgetting. So why does this one matter?
The difference is that Devin Review seems purpose built specifically for the review experience rather than being a feature tacked onto a coding assistant. So I dug into it to see what those purposes actually are.
The smart diff organization is the big one imo. Instead of showing you files in alphabetical order like GitHub does, it groups related changes together so you can follow the logic of what actually changed. Anyone who's reviewed a massive PR knows how painful it is to jump around trying to piece together what happened. Most AI review tools will comment on your code but they still make you navigate GitHub's default diff view.
It also has this copy and move detection feature. When someone moves code from one file to another, GitHub shows it as a full delete and a full insert. Devin Review actually recognizes that pattern and displays it cleanly so you're not staring at hundreds of lines wondering what really changed. I have not seen other tools handle this specific problem.
The friction is also way lower than most alternatives. You can try it right now by just swapping github.com to devinreview.com in any PR URL. No IDE required, no subscription, no setup. It is free for public repos and works on private repos if you have a Devin account or use their CLI.
One other nice touch is that it respects your existing instruction files like AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and cursor rules. So if you already have coding standards documented for other AI tools it will use that context when analyzing your PRs.
The bug catcher feature automatically scans for issues and ranks them by severity. Severe bugs get flagged for immediate attention while lower confidence stuff gets marked as investigate or informational.
What I find most interesting is the underlying philosophy. Cognition is basically saying the role of human developers is shifting from writing code to being architects who review and guide AI generated work. Whether you agree with that vision or not, building tools specifically for that workflow rather than just adding review as a checkbox feature is a smart move.
Curious to hear from anyone who has actually used this on a real PR. How does the bug detection compare to what you would have caught yourself? And does the smart diff grouping actually save you time or is it just a gimmick?
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This is a great breakdown! It makes total sense when you look at where things are headed. I recently wrote a piece on the top 10 AI trends for 2026 that called this out directly. Developer roles are shifting from writing code to orchestrating and reviewing it.
As the cost of generating code is going down dramatically, the new question teams are asking is: "Can we ship this?" as opposed to "Can we build this?"
The stat that stuck with me is how senior devs benefit more from AI than juniors because AI amplifies judgment. If you can't evaluate the output you're just compounding errors faster.
So it tracks that we're seeing a new breed of review tools emerge. Devin Review, Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, they're all responding to the same shift.
The volume of AI generated code is about to explode and traditional code review workflows weren't built for that pace. We're going to see this space evolve in ways we have not seen historically and this is just the tip of the iceberg imo.
Curious if anyone else is feeling this shift in their day to day yet.