I've found a pretty good speed up just letting Claude Code run with a custom prompt to gather the context (relevant files, types, etc..) for the task then having it put together a document with that context.

It takes all of five minutes to have it run and at the end I can review it, if it's small ask it to execute, and if it actually requires me to work it myself well now I have a reference with line numbers, some comments on how the system appears to work, what the intent is, areas of interest, etc..

I also rely heavily on the sequential thinking MCP server to give it more structure.

Edit:

I will say because I think it's important I've been a senior dev for a while now, a lot of my job _is_ reviewing other people's pull requests. I don't find it hard or tedious at all.

Honestly it's a lot easier to review a few small "PRs" as the agent works than some of the giant PRs I'd get from team members before.

> I've been a senior dev for a while now, a lot of my job _is_ reviewing other people's pull requests

I kind of hate that I'm saying this, but I'm sort of similar and one thing I really like is having zero guilt about trashing the LLM's code. So often people are submitting something and the code is OK but just pervasively not quite how I like it. Some staff will engage in micro arguments about things rather than just doing them how I want and it's just tiring. Then LLMs are really good at explaining why they did stuff (or simulating that) as well. LLMs will enthusiastically redo something and then help adjust their own AGENTS.md file to align better in the future.