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PR reviews were already broken. AI made it worse

The PR review crisis is a Swiss cheese problem.
June 01, 2026

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Key takeaways:

  • AI didn’t create the PR review problem – it made it unsustainable.
  • The real issue is data: agents working on incomplete, poorly correlated data produce PRs that fix symptoms, not root causes.
  • The fix is layers, not a single solution.

Pull request (PR) reviews were already a known weak point in software development before AI-coding agents arrived. While AI tools didn’t create the problem, they made it impossible to ignore.

Even when humans wrote code at human speed, the model struggled. PRs sat unreviewed for days. Reviewers skimmed 500-line diffs before returning to their own work.

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