Researchers looked at firms that added AI coding agents. The time between a pull request’s submission and its merge grew by 49 percent. Pull requests also needed changes twice as often, and comments per request rose 35 percent. About 14 percent more workers started doing code reviews, but overall staffing levels stayed flat. By March 2026, 80 percent of firms used AI for some review comments, yet the agents produced only 23.3 percent of those comments.
Why it matters
Software teams may see faster code generation but must budget extra time for human reviews.
