I think checklist level thinking for code reviews is bad though. It ends up being a pretty soul destroying experience when someone tells you that you need to validate arguments to all methods as not null (for the 100 you wrote), or that you should take the data in your test cases and put it in a text file. Or that you've re-used the same string in several places and should make it constant. Robots can tell me that, and I can get their feedback while I'm developing or choose to ignore it. People are invaluable for helping you step back and see how to re-organize your code, introduce new abstractions, re-interpret requirements, and see actual bugs that no QA person or tool would ever discover (likely affecting some unlucky user who would hit an extremely rare bug that couldn't be reproduced easily). Those types of reviews are invaluable. Put down the checklist and automate it instead.