Will AI Kill Code Review? with Francisco Trindade, VP at Braze

In this episode of Modern CTO, Joel Beasley speaks with Francisco Trindade, VP of Software Engineering at Braze, about the transformative impact of AI on software development—particularly the future of code review. Francisco shares his perspective that while AI has already begun to shift the bottleneck from code writing to code review, the real question is whether organizations can evolve their systems, processes, and codebases to enable AI agents to operate at scale without human oversight. He draws parallels to past tech shifts like microservices, warning that adopting AI without a clear problem to solve leads to failure, while a systems-thinking approach—viewing teams as interconnected systems—leads to sustainable innovation. Francisco also reflects on his own leadership journey, including early burnout from overcommitment and key lessons on incremental improvement and career development. He emphasizes that leadership is not about perfection but consistent progress, and that careers make sense only in hindsight, not in forward planning. The conversation underscores the need for strategic investment in codebase modernization and data-driven engineering to unlock 10x productivity gains in the AI era.