For style, there are points of style that no automated tool that currently exists can enforce, such as 'good naming'. At the moment that looks like an AI-hard p

For style, there are points of style that no automated tool that currently exists can enforce, such as 'good naming'. At the moment that looks like an AI-hard problem. For your point about sharing knowledge, your argument works against all forms of sharing knowledge. You may as well say that wikis are unnecessary, because standups, code, comments, and code reviews share knowledge. What you have missed is that these different modes of knowledge sharing work better at sharing different kinds of knowledge, which is why you (should) want all of them. Also, good developers are not really fungible. Developer X may be really good at making code flow, so that what it is trying to do is not obscured by how it is doing it, and developer Y might have a really good knowledge of algorithms and an eye for optimisation. In that case, having them review each other's code will always result both in better code and in (eventually) better developers. As far as it goes, I have seen plenty of badly done, useless code reviews. I have also had really well done code reviews, where someone would email me an annotated diff of one of my commits, or where I would pair for a few hours with someone going over some thorny code I or they had committed and making it less thorny, or where we would go back and forth refactoring some piece of code while talking over the whys and wherefores. If I had only had bad code reviews I would be much more sympathetic to the point you are making, but as it is I just think that you have never been involved with a competently done code review.