Picture a reviewer opening a PR on Monday morning. The title says "Add user search endpoint." They click on the Files tab.
+847 −12
Eight hundred forty-seven lines added. The reviewer has maybe 15 minutes before the next meeting. They scroll through the diff. The code looks clean — variable names are descriptive, functions are reasonable length, there are tests. They skim, see nothing obviously wrong, and approve.
Three weeks later, the feature ships. Users complain the search is slow. Two weeks after that, the database team files an urgent ticket: a query is scanning 4 million rows on every request. The fix takes a day. The post-mortem blames "insufficient load testing."
The post-mortem is wrong. The problem was that a reviewer with 15 minutes can't meaningfully review 847 lines of AI-generated code. And that's the new reality for half the PRs most teams see in 2026.
