Thought Leadership 3 min read · May 2026

# Review Is Not Governance

CodeRabbit helps review AI-generated code. Mneme helps govern what the AI generates in the first place. These are not competing tools. They are different layers of the same problem.

By Theo Valmis · Published May 2026 · Updated May 2026

Post-generation
Code review
Reads what the AI produced. Flags problems. Asks for revisions. Operates after the code exists.
Pre-generation
Governance
Shapes what the AI is allowed to produce. Enforces constraints before the first line is written.

Most teams using AI coding assistants have invested in the review layer. Tools like CodeRabbit, PR comment bots, and AI-assisted linters sit at the end of the pipeline, inspecting output after it surfaces in a pull request. That is useful work.

But it is reactive by design. You are reading the result of a generation process that already happened. The architectural violation, the naming drift, the deprecated dependency — they are already in the diff. Now you are deciding whether to accept them or ask for a rewrite.

Governance operates differently. It runs before generation. It takes the architectural decisions your team has made — which services own which data, which dependencies are approved, which patterns are preferred — and makes them available to the AI assistant at the moment it is about to write code. Constraints are enforced at the source, not caught in review.

The distinction matters at scale. When AI multiplies code output 10-50x, catching violations after generation means reviewing the same class of problems over and over. Preventing them before generation means they stop appearing.

## Two layers, one stack

The AI coding stack is evolving into three distinct layers, only one of which most teams have built deliberately:

L3
Governance · before generation Decision corpus, scope, precedence, pre-tool-use hook. The upstream layer most teams are only beginning to build.
L2
Review · after generation CodeRabbit, PR bots, AI-assisted linters. Inspects what surfaces in a pull request. The quality gate.
L1
Generation · the runtime Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot. Produces output at AI velocity. The engine.

These layers are complementary. A team with strong generation tooling and strong review tooling but no governance layer will ship fast and review often — and still accumulate architectural drift at AI velocity. A team that adds the governance layer stops correcting and starts directing.

When intent only enters the workflow at PR review, the organization has already allowed the wrong work to be generated. That is the core failure mode of intent debt in AI-native engineering: decisions that exist but are not enforced at the moment agents produce code.

## Why governance is infrastructure, not a feature

Security engineering went through this same evolution. Code security was once a review concern: scan the output, flag the vulnerabilities, ask for fixes. Shift-left security moved those checks earlier — into the IDE, into the CI pipeline, into the generation process itself. The industry now treats security tooling as infrastructure, not an optional review enhancement.

Architectural governance is at the same inflection point. As AI dramatically increases the volume of code entering a codebase, the constraints that govern that code must be embedded earlier in the process. Review catches what slips through. Governance determines what gets generated in the first place.

That is the layer Mneme is built for.

Related governance concepts

- Governance before generation

  Enforcement at the point of AI intent, not at the point of human review.

- Architectural governance

  The system that turns team decisions into machine-evaluable constraints enforced at generation time.

- Governance infrastructure

  The platform layer that encodes, distributes, versions, and enforces decisions across agents and CI.

- Verification contracts

  Pre-registered, machine-evaluable assertions that define what a governance check must prove.

Related operational essays

- Harness Engineering Still Needs Governance

  Review is the last gate. Governance is the first. Harnesses produce the volume that breaks the gate.

- Why Observability Is Not Governance

  Visibility explains drift after it occurs. Governance constrains drift before generation.

- Memory Is Not Governance

  Recall systems retrieve. Governance systems refuse. Two different infrastructures for two different problems.