Coding agents · Anthropic, GitHub Copilot
Coding agent for 300 devs: PR queue doubled, then we fixed it
◐ Mixed
What happened
We gave every team a coding agent in the same week. Pull requests doubled within a fortnight and the seniors spent their mornings reviewing generated code. Nobody had planned for the review load, only for the writing. By week three the queue was four days long and people started approving things they had not read.
What it cost
Tokens were the small part. Senior review time was the big one: roughly two extra hours per senior per day at the peak.
What we fixed
We capped agent pull requests per reviewer per day, asked for a two-line human summary on each one, and split anything over 400 lines.
The lessonCap agent pull requests per reviewer before you scale.
Reality numbers
- Team
- 201–1000 people
- Monthly AI spend
- €10k–50k
- Still running after 90 days
- yes