“We find evidence of a bottleneck from the code review process: The average time to review…” — Fiona Chen and James Stratton, Harvard University

“We find evidence of a bottleneck from the code review process: The average time to review a pull request increases by 49%, the share of pull requests with changes requested nearly doubles, and the number of comments per pull request increases by 35%.”

— Fiona Chen and James Stratton, Harvard University · Introduction; developed in Section 4, "Production bottlenecks"

Quote · fion.ac

Read the source on fion.ac

From “Review time up 49% after AI adoption”, found 2026-10-16.

Take

Causal evidence behind "review is the bottleneck", and it persists after firms adopt AI code review. Job-market paper on the author's site (version of 2026-08-04); no SSRN or NBER copy found.

Plan
Verify

AI-drafted