The agent wrote the migration. Are you really going to Approve it?

Tuesday afternoon, that Approve button Tuesday, 3 p.m. A PR notification lands in Slack. Junior writes in the channel: "Cursor generated this migration for me — can you take a look?" You open the diff. Eighty lines of ALTER TABLE . Add columns, change types, add indexes, attach foreign keys — every line is familiar on its own. Syntax is clean. Naming matches team conventions. Mechanically, it all looks plausible . But together? That NOT NULL on biz_order has no default — will it pass on existing rows? How long does the type change on sys_user lock the table? Does the down migration actually restore the previous schema? The PR description says "Agent self-review: should be fine" — that is not evidence. Reject the whole thing and you look like you are blocking the team or fighting AI. Click Approve and your name is on it. When production blows up, the postmortem asks "who approved this version?" and you say: "CI passed; it looked okay to me." You cannot spin up a database for every PR. In the end there are only two performances: pretend to understand — comment on naming and click Approve; pretend to be strict — send it back three times for formatting, and still nobody notices the missing join table. This failure has a name: reviewed without reviewing This is not a moral failure of "not reading carefully enough." It has a name — reviewed without reviewing : generation speed went up; human review speed did not. The Agent spits out eighty lines of ALTER in three seconds; your brain still runs at "read SQL line by line." SQL diffs are mostly noise — VARCHAR(64) to VARCHAR(128) fills half the screen, while the change that actually blows up (missing join table, FK pointing at the wrong parent) hides in the middle and looks like any other edit. People in the industry summarize it in one line: No human can review at this speed. That is not an insult — it is a mechanism claim. When the output is executable statements and the input is an eighty-line character diff, the Tech Lea