I Made a Fruit Fly Review My Code - Nick Nisi, WorkOS

Code is being written faster than ever, and Nick Nisi, who leads developer and agent experience at WorkOS, argues that the human reviewer is now the bottleneck. To make the point, he hooked a simulated fruit fly brain, built from a full scan of its neurons, up to code review: AI turns each change into literal "code smells," sugar and bitter rewards teach the fly what good and bad code taste like, and it was right about 88% of the time in testing. Then he plays a live round against the audience and lays out a practical plan where team review skills, classifiers and automated reviewers only send the risky pull requests to a human, backed by proof like screenshots and smoke tests. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:37 Humans are the bottleneck 2:35 Where the word "bug" came from 3:04 Using a bug to find bugs 4:00 Wiring a fruit fly brain into code review 4:57 Turning code into smells 6:43 Sugar, bitterness and memory 7:32 Does the fly actually matter? 8:15 Game: are you smarter than a fruit fly? 10:22 Trying a real pull request 11:55 What only humans know: why 12:33 Escalate only the reviews that matter 14:56 Proof instead of review Nick Nisi https://workos.com Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!