Shipping code faster with o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.1

CodeRabbit⁠(opens in a new window) was launched in 2023 by a team of former engineering leaders who had felt the pain of slow, manual code reviews firsthand. While AI made it easier to write code, there weren’t tools to solve the biggest bottleneck: getting code shipped.

“You could generate a million lines of code,” says Sahil M. Bansal, Senior Product Manager at CodeRabbit. “But if your review process only supports 1,000 lines, that’s all you’re shipping.”

The insight was simple but powerful: the bottleneck in software development had shifted from code generation to code review. So the team focused on using OpenAI’s models not only to write code, but also to unlock the speed, accuracy, and intelligence required to review it. Over the last year, CodeRabbit has been used by more than 5,000 customers and 70,000 open-source projects.

Shifting AI from code generation to code review

As engineering teams leaned into AI for code generation, the limitations of manual code reviews became more apparent. Reviews were slow, repetitive, and missed critical issues—particularly across large, distributed teams, unfamiliar codebases or edge cases that are hard to detect. Valuable developer time was spent reviewing instead of building, and costly bugs were escaping into production.

CodeRabbit’s team knew the problem intimately. “Even when teams used AI to generate more code, they weren’t shipping faster,” Bansal explains. “The code review cycle was the bottleneck.” 

And while some companies attempted to solve this by encouraging reviews during development, CodeRabbit believed that the most effective check came just before shipping—once all the code came together, like tributaries feeding a river.

“We realized this was the most strategic moment to apply AI for code reviews,” says Aravind Putrevu, Director of Developer Marketing at CodeRabbit. “It’s when the risk is highest and the context is most complex.”