This works great when team size is tiny and everyone is an experienced engineer. I grew my team from just 2->8. Without a robust CI/CD pipeline and establishing

This works great when team size is tiny and everyone is an experienced engineer. I grew my team from just 2->8. Without a robust CI/CD pipeline and establishing code review practices we would have been breaking prod every other day. I agree with author that trust is proportional to velocity. But it takes sometime to build that trust. Writing code reviews is skill that engineers need to acquire. A lot of that is emotional quotient than IQ. Code reviews should give context to the PR owner that {s}he doesn't have by just going through the code. Let the review bots and other integration tests take care of breakage etc. I check PR stats for my teams repo and track mean time of PR approval and few merge time metrics. This is just to make sure, that there is no back and forth happening during reviews and median time to merge PR is relatively constant. One can leverage these metrics to know which team member is being a douchebag.