note · 2026-09-11

The number to watch is code merged with no review at all

Two years of telemetry from 22,000 developers. Output is up, review time is up 441.5%, and pull requests merged with no review at all are up 31.3%. Review is where an AI initiative is won or lost.

For CTOs and engineering leads of SaaS companies whose review queue is growing faster than their outputyaab2 min read
The number to watch is code merged with no review at all

The most useful number in Faros AI's 2026 engineering report is not the throughput gain. It is the 31.3% rise in pull requests merged with no review at all.

The report draws on two years of telemetry from 22,000 developers and more than 4,000 teams (April 2026), comparing periods of lowest and highest AI adoption within each organization; the figures are that comparison, not a trend line. Faros's own explanation for the unreviewed merges is that reviewers cannot keep pace with the volume. Output rose: task throughput per developer up 33.7%, epics completed up 66%. Review did not keep up: median time in review up 441.5%. Faros calls it the senior engineer tax. When reviewers cannot keep pace, code goes through unread, and incidents per merged pull request are up 242.7%. Our reading, not Faros's: tasks and epics are sized differently by every team, so the throughput figures say volume moved, not how much work got done. Faros's September 2026 update, on the most recent twelve months, puts unreviewed merges up 76.3% and incidents per pull request up 14.5%: the damage per change eased, the review gap widened.

We have lived that queue inside a SaaS client's team, where an unreviewed merge reaches every customer at once. What held was not reviewing faster. It was moving checks in front of the human, so that what reached a senior was the fraction that needed one.

Two practitioners said the same in 2026. Addy Osmani (Google) on X: every pull request gets an agent first pass, humans cover blast radius, "don't read all the code". Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast: code review is "hugely overloaded", and validation was never its most important part.

Our reading: review is where an AI initiative is won or lost, and it is won by deciding what a human reads.

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