Pull requests are up 5x in three years and teams are rebuilding review around risk triage instead of reading code
Gergely Orosz gathers the numbers: GitHub PRs rose fivefold over three years and PRs plus commits nearly doubled since the end of 2025 alone. At Duckbill Group, a five-person startup, weekly merged PRs went from 353 to 684 (up 80%), PRs merged within an hour went from 28% to 45%, and human-reviewed PRs took a median 26 hours against 1 hour for unreviewed ones. The approaches documented include AI review with human sign-off (CodeRabbit, Greptile, Qodo, Uber's uReview filtering low-confidence comments, and WeTravel abandoning it over noise), risk-based triage at OpenAI, Anthropic and Duckbill where auth, public APIs, design systems and DB schemas force human review, and reviewing the plan, tests and schema rather than the diff.
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