AI-Generated Code Is Piling Up in Review Queues and Slowing Shipping
A software team of six found that adopting AI coding tools more than doubled their weekly pull requests, from about 31 to 68, while median time-to-merge tripled from roughly 4 hours to 14. The surge created a bottleneck not in writing code but in reviewing it, as human attention remained a fixed resource even as generation became far cheaper. AI-produced diffs proved harder to evaluate than human-written ones because they lack the subtle inconsistencies that signal where an author was uncertain, forcing reviewers to scrutinize every line equally. Compounding the problem, slower reviews pushed authors to bundle more changes into each PR, which made reviews slower still, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. The team found relief through social rather than technical fixes, including hard caps on diff size, mandatory explanation sections, and a rule that authors must be able to describe their changes in a single sentence.
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