If AI Coding Doubles the Pull Requests, Who Reviews Them?

One company hit its “2x” target. A July preprint followed 802 developers and 196,212 pull requests at an unusually AI-forward software firm. By April, merged PRs per engineer were 2.09 times the pre-mandate baseline. The checking did not disappear. Per-reviewer load roughly doubled, and automated reviews overtook human ones. Merge and short-horizon revert rates stayed flat, which is useful evidence—but not a bill for defects found months later or reviewers’ lost focus time. I would put four numbers beside the PR count: minutes of human review per shipped change, wait for first review, fixes and rollbacks over the next 90 days, and after-hours review. Review is not waste. It is where someone catches the bad assumption before a customer does. This is one non-randomized, unusually favorable company, and merged PRs are a narrow proxy. Treat 2x as a ceiling worth studying, not a promise. If your code output doubled, which review number would tell you the team actually gained capacity?