The Skim

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

The agent hands you a 600-line diff. You have eleven minutes before your next meeting. You scroll fast, eyes catching on anything red, anything that says DELETE, anything with the word 'password' in it, and if nothing jumps out, you approve. The skim is the modern code review: not reading, exactly, but scanning for the shape of danger.

Real Talk

The skim refers to a fast, pattern-based review technique developers apply to large AI-generated diffs, prioritizing detection of obviously risky changes over comprehensive line-by-line reading. It's a pragmatic adaptation to the sheer volume of code agentic tools can produce, but it also means subtle logic errors are far more likely to slip through than in traditional review.

When You'll Hear This

"I only had time for the skim, someone else needs to actually read the auth changes." / "The bug was hiding in exactly the kind of line the skim is built to miss."