You shipped a feature with Cursor or Lovable. It works. Then a teammate asks you to walk them through the error handling. You open the file. You trail off. If that moment feels familiar, the problem isn't your code — it's that standard code review instincts weren't built for AI-generated output. AI code is syntactically correct but semantically fragile : it compiles, TypeScript is happy, the happy path works — but the assumptions underneath were never surfaced. This post gives you a focused mental model: the 5 patterns that require a human judgment call, and the AI self-review prompts that handle the mechanical checks so you don't have to.

Why AI Code Review Is Different

Traditional code review assumes a human wrote the code — someone who made decisions with intent, who understood the domain, who chose an approach and can explain it.…