The Incoming tide of New Code

In 1985, Peter Naur talked about programming as theory building¹
Modern developers are inundated with code reviews, leading some to declare “The End of Code Review”², decry code reviews³, and say code review is dead⁴.
One study⁵ at Microsoft found a 24% increase in PRs/engineer/day after introducing agentic tools like Claude Code and Copilot CLI at Microsoft in early 2026.
However, a study⁶ from 2025 found that LLMs introduced 185 security vulnerabilities, compared to 20 by developers.
It’s time to take back context.

Understanding Rationale

Rationale provides context about the justification for a code change that can’t be recovered from just the code diff¹.
Our previous study² found that Goal, Need, and Alternatives are the most common of seven rationale components.
So we built a tool called ARGUS to do collect, identify, and synthesize rationale information for developers.

A 2023 study¹ noted:

“We conclude that in-IDE prompt-less interaction with LLMs is a promising future direction for tool builders.”
So that’s what we did. Link to Extension