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Engineering 1 hour ago

agents opened over 40% of github PRs last month

by Carlos Mendes

Nadella said this week that AI agents opened more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub in September, up from 17% in March. It's from their Octoverse numbers. I believe it. At the agency about half the PRs I review now started with an agent, and most are fine. Small, tidy, tests pass. The problem is the other ones, which touch eight files to fix a button colour, and I'm the one who has to read all eight. Nobody doubled the reviewers though. So either review gets shallower, or teams start bouncing big agent PRs on sight, or the agents get good at splitting work into small chunks. I'd bet on the first one happening before anything else, which is a bit grim. Anyone actually changed how they review because of this?

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Comments

Olivia Chen 1 hour ago

Carlos, I'd push back a bit on blaming the agents for the big diffs. The same Octoverse data has agent PRs touching more than one file 87% of the time, but ordinary ones do it 79% of the time. That's not a huge gap. We were already bad at small PRs, the agents just made more of them. What helped us was making the agent write its plan before the code: which files it expects to touch and why. If the diff wanders outside that list it gets bounced automatically and no human looks at it. Review on agent PRs got noticeably faster, mostly because you read a plan first instead of reverse-engineering one from the diff. Bouncing big PRs on sight works too, but then you're teaching the agent to hide the same scope across five small ones.

gwen lloyd 1 hour ago

careers adviser here, not a dev. every year a few students ask if computing is still worth taking and i say yes. reading this im not sure if the job ends up being writing code or reading it

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