Review debt is the growing backlog of changes that have been produced faster than humans can properly validate, test, and secure them. It often appears when automation, AI coding agents, or rapid deployment pipelines create more pull requests, configuration edits, or infrastructure changes than security and engineering teams can review in time.
It matters because unreviewed changes can hide logic bugs, permission mistakes, insecure defaults, or malicious code. In attacks, adversaries may exploit this pressure by slipping risky changes into overloaded release processes. In defense, teams reduce review debt with approval gates, automated testing, policy checks, code scanning, sandboxed execution, and strict rollback paths. The goal is not only to ship quickly, but to keep every change within a trust boundary humans can still control.