AI Writes More PRs. Who Validates Them? — Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Sonar

AI means more PRs, bigger PRs, and more bugs. Your choice is to slow down or rubber-stamp, unless validation gets automated too. Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, co-founder of Gitar (now part of Sonar), focuses on verifying code. CI and code review are where quality gates live, and they get slower and more expensive as teams grow. AI makes it worse with more and bigger PRs, leaving teams to either slow down or rubber-stamp and risk incidents. His answer is agentic validation: an agent that reviews PRs with as little noise as possible, explains CI failures and catches flaky tests, fixes issues until the PR is green, and approves and merges based on rules you set. He describes how users build trust step by step toward full automation, the insights it gives platform teams and leaders, what's under the hood (control plane, custom harness and LLM proxy), and why combining agents with program analysis in SonarQube beats either alone. In this talk: • Why AI-generated code turns CI and code review into a bottleneck • Agentic validation: review, CI analysis, autofix and auto-merge • How teams build trust step by step toward fully automated PRs • Why agents plus program analysis beat either alone SPEAKER Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Co-founder, Gitar (now part of Sonar) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliadl/ X: https://x.com/aadltaba LINKS Gitar by Sonar: https://www.sonarsource.com/products/gitar/ Sonar: https://www.sonarsource.com Sonar on X: https://x.com/SonarSource CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:43 CI and code review: the critical path 1:57 Failures cost hours and days 2:57 AI makes it worse 3:22 Slow down or rubber-stamp 3:42 Agentic validation 4:07 Noise-free code review 4:42 CI failures and flaky tests 5:02 Autofix until green 5:27 Auto-approve and auto-merge 5:47 The path to full automation 7:06 Insights for platform teams 7:36 Insights for leaders 7:56 Under the hood 9:01 Agents plus program analysis 9:36 Results 10:26 Wrap-up Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn:…