Pull-Requests

The PR Tsunami: What AI Code Volume Is Doing to Your Review Process

AI coding tools delivered on their core promise: developers write less, ship more. Teams using AI complete 21% more tasks. PR volume has exploded—some teams that previously handled 10–15 pull requests per week are now seeing 50–100. In a narrow sense, that’s a win.

But there’s a tax on that win that most engineering leaders aren’t accounting for: AI-generated PRs wait 4.6x longer for review than human-written code, despite actually being reviewed 2x faster once someone picks them up. The bottleneck isn’t coding anymore. It’s review capacity, and it’s getting worse as AI generation accelerates.