Monday morning, 9:23 am.
You open your laptop and glance at your notifications. Seventeen open PRs. Some were written over the weekend by your team. Some were churned out late last night by Copilot. You sigh. You know only a handful will get reviewed today. Maybe less.
A few are small. A few are massive. One touches five services. Another rewrites an auth flow that’s older than half the team. You already know what’s going to happen: one or two will get attention, and the rest? They’ll sit. Like they did last week. And the week before.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
The Real Cost of Slow Code Reviews
Code review was supposed to be a checkpoint for quality. A way to share knowledge. Instead, it's become a velocity sink. A backlog builder.
How did the thing meant to protect code quality become the thing that kills velocity?
PRs often sit idle for days. An analysis of ~1,000,000 GitHub repos found it takes ~4 business days to review and merge a PR. Google recommends one day. Almost no one hits that.
As engineering leaders, we’ve increasingly started to see how code reviews are becoming bottlenecks. In high velocity teams, pull requests pile up and reviews drag on, leaving engineers frustrated and features stalled. In this blog we break down the real pain points: why PRs sit idle, why reviewers burnout, and how all this damages velocity, morale, code quality, and even hiring. No smoke and mirrors here, just an honest, unbiased look at how manual code review processes are holding us back.
Sudheer, “I remember project after project where one “stuck” PR snowballed delays through the sprint. It wasn’t just annoying - it was expensive. In short, the longer reviews take, the more velocity we would lose – and that would have a knock-on effect on morale, product quality, and our bottom line.”
Now, we've all seen this problem, and while tools accelerate coding, the review process often remains stubbornly manual. Why are we still reviewing code manually when writing it has become so easy? This leads to critical issues like:
Let’s look at this deeper, one by one
1. PR Bottlenecks: Idle Pull Requests & Merge Delays
One of the most brutal pain points is PR bottlenecks. In practice this looks like dozens of open pull requests with nobody touching them. The reasons can vary; a reviewer is busy, people are tied up in different projects or a PR is massive and nobody wants to tackle it – but the result is the same: work piles up in limbo which leads to
- When even one PR takes days, related work queues up, which directly impacts velocity.
- When work que’s-up on and on, the morale dips.
- Higher the number of PRs to be reviewed, lower the quality of code shipped because of flashy reviews.
- A sluggish code review process is a quick way to lose great engineers—they notice, and they’ll start looking elsewhere.
- Hiring & Retention: Finally, a snail-paced code review process is a red flag for talent. Top engineers expect agility. If word gets out that your process is glacial, they’ll think twice. It’s telling that developers frustrated by poor reviews are many times more likely to jump ship.
A gitlab survey noted, 52% of developers report feeling “blocked, and slow due to inefficient reviews,” effectively killing productivity.
2. Review Fatigue: When Pull Requests Become a Chore
Review fatigue hits every team we’ve spoken to - it’s burning out from trudging through endless code, nitpicking minor issues, or facing mountains of changes in one go. Big PRs get delayed or skimmed because no one has the time or mental energy, and small PRs create nonstop context switching, it wears people down. Reviewers start resenting the process, authors get anxious, and eventually, rubber-stamp reviews to get it over with. It turns code review into a chore instead of a valuable step and when that happens, both quality and morale take a hit. Some symptoms include:
- Reviewing endless small changesets quickly turns into mindless box-ticking, leading to rushed “flashy reviews” instead of meaningful feedback.
- Constant interruptions for reviews break deep focus and drain productivity, leaving developers frustrated and distracted from actual coding.
- When a few senior devs handle most of the reviews, it creates burnout and quiet resentment across the team.
3. Coordination: Communication Breakdowns (Specially for remote teams)
Even with the best intentions, remote teams often struggle with coordination during code reviews. Async communication can cause delays, especially across time zones, where PRs end up waiting overnight or longer. Without clear SLAs like “review within 24 hours,” things slip through the cracks. Add in scattered communication across GitHub, Slack, email, or Jira, and it’s easy to lose track of where feedback lives. Without a single source of truth, reviews become unpredictable and prone to getting stuck in limbo.
4. Culture and Morale: Burnout, Blame, and Turnover
Code review isn’t just a process - it’s a social interaction, a forum for discussion and learning, and when it goes wrong, it hurts morale. Abrasive comments or nitpicky feedback can feel personal, making engineers anxious or defensive, and leading to a culture where people tiptoe around PRs or rush approvals just to avoid conflict. When review culture turns toxic, teams stop learning from each other, quality drops, and collaboration breaks down. Worse, it drives people away - top engineers won’t stick around if reviews feel hostile or pointless.
In another survey, unhappy devs were 2.6× more likely to be looking for a new job.
The Inevitable Shift to AI-Powered Code Review
Given all these pain points, it’s clear that manual review processes are hitting their limits. The solution isn’t more ping-pong meetings or “extra devs on review duty” – that just scales the pain. The next leap is automation, and specifically AI-driven assistance in code review that intelligently offloads the mundane, repetitive tasks.
This shift is inevitable for high-velocity teams. Across the board you hear developers and leaders wanting to build a PR agent or an AI code reviewer, more often. Whether it’s a bot integrated into GitHub or a chat-oriented PR agent in Slack, the goal is the same: automate what can be automated. Why should a human spend time on one-click lint fixes or searching for obvious bugs in every PR? An AI assistant can handle those instantly, removing tons of tiny tasks that currently exhaust reviewers. It’s not about replacing engineers – it’s about augmenting them to focus on the hard, creative parts of the job.
At Hivel, we’ve already built an AI Code Review Agent with exactly this vision. Our agent reads through pull requests, points out potential issues, and even suggests fixes –all before a busy teammate ever opens the PR. It’s designed to eliminate those PR bottlenecks and cut down review fatigue by providing actionable, relevant feedback, so teams can get back to shipping features.The future of code review is AI-assisted, and those who adapt will see code velocity and quality both rise.
In the end, the human cost is too high to stick with old habits. We all want smoother sprints, happier developers, and fewer bugs. The writing on the wall is clear: AI-powered code review is here, and it’s the natural solution to our pain points. The only question is whether your team is ready for it? To know more talk to us here.
Also Read- AI Code Review Tools: Can it Make Code Reviews More Human?
