The Review Bottleneck

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0600

AI-coauthored pull requests average 10.83 issues apiece against 6.45 for presumed human-only ones, according to CodeRabbit, a code-review vendor whose analysis covered 470 open source pull requests. Teams solved the bottleneck in writing code and built a new one in reviewing it.

68% of engineers surveyed say AI has already changed how they run code review, and 86% of those use AI to pre-screen before a human ever opens the diff, per LeadDev’s 2026 survey. The same survey found review’s own response to all that upstream speed is mixed, not uniformly faster: 29% say reviews now take longer, 24% report time savings, and the largest share, 47%, see no change at all. LeadDev’s own conclusion matches what I’ve been watching: “Manual code review is now the bottleneck.”

Developer-Tools on David R. Longnecker - Converting Coffee to Code

The Review Bottleneck