PRs sucked to review long before Agents were a thing, but now it really sucks because there are more to review.

Like you said, they sucked back then but it was more rare to get PRs of many thousand lines to review multiple times a day in my experience. But I also run into a problem now in which I have coworkers in two camps. There are some that, when they send me a PR and I have serious concerns about it, it's because they disagree with me fundamentally on some concept and we need to chat and discuss it. And then there's some coworkers who send me with a PR I have serious concerns about because it's very clear they never reviewed the LLM output before making a PR. Those people also tend to take my comments, run them against their LLM session, and slack me back some Claude list-of-questions stuff, and often also respond to me with LLMese.

I firmly believe there's no reason to employ the latter group. I have several coworkers like this that I could replace with a Claude session or two every week and I'd still have to push back on work and review a lot, but I'd still wind up saving time because then I'd talk directly to Claude.

So I guess my point is that I dislike AI era code review because for some subset of it, I basically can't even assume a human has ever looked at it, and that by doing so, I'm doing the work for one of my coworkers who is probably doing his grocery shopping at 2PM as I read it.

Right on. In many ways AI has just exposed how bogus and delusional our industry's "process" has been for years.