Comparison
Automated checks and human review are not competitors.
Every argument about replacing one with the other assumes they answer the same question. They do not, and the cost of confusing them is paid in escaped defects.
Same input, different instruments.
Automated pass
Deterministic rules against submitted work.
Human review
A named person reading for judgement.
Answers
Is this defect class present?
Is this argument sound, and would I sign it?
Good at
Secrets, structure, placeholders, provenance, repetition — at volume.
Intent, audience fit, whether a claim is defensible.
Blind to
Truth, taste, and anything requiring context outside the file.
Volume. Attention is the constraint and it does not scale.
Cost
Near zero per additional item.
Hours, priced by discipline.
Consistency
Identical every run.
Varies by reviewer and by time of day — which is why scope matters.
Output
Findings with severity and a rule name.
A decision, a scope and a name attached to it.
Failure mode
False confidence: passing the checks read as quality.
Approving volume: a tick that never meant anything.
The sequence that works
Run the mechanical pass first, on everything, automatically. It removes the findings a reviewer should never spend attention on and leaves a report the reviewer can start from.
Then route only what needs judgement to a person, with the report attached and the scope agreed in advance. Reviewing without a stated scope produces approvals that mean nothing six months later.
Why 'we have reviewers' is not a quality system
A reviewer reading a forty-page brief will read the first pages and skim the rest, because that is what attention does. Structure is what makes the reading reliable: a report to work from, a defined scope, and a record kept with the version.
Run it yourself
Find out what your AI output is hiding.
The console is free, needs no account and uploads nothing. See the findings first, then decide whether you want a specialist to sign it off.