Leaked account: Google-style review bureaucracy stalls startup Reflection, PRs take weeks to merge
SonglinYang4 · x · 2026-11-08
Prakash M says he's increasingly bearish on Reflection.AI, arguing the startup imported Google's engineering bureaucracy. An attached first-person account describes strict AI-code review rules (PRs capped at 1,000 lines, rigid naming/comment standards) enforced by Google/Gemini veterans. The author claims that at a startup with no product yet, PRs often take one to two weeks or even a month to merge — "a race towards certain death." They kept experiments on a private branch and used another AI to review trivial code to bypass approvals, until colleagues reported the practice to HR as a serious security violation.
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