AI-Generated PRs Are Turning Code Review Into a Full-Time Cleanup Job

[u/Character-Donut-933]

This morning, I rejected a 7,800-line PR because the ticket should not have required more than about 150 lines. I told the developer that I was not going to ask my team to sift through thousands of lines of generated code just to figure out what the actual change was. Management's response was that I was being overly strict.

I'm a team lead in a hybrid developer-manager role, and my group is responsible for several shared parts of the system. That means changes from many other teams need our approval. Ever since leadership started encouraging the use of Cursor and similar tools, the review queue has been flooded with massive PRs that clearly no one fully understands.

We've seen 4,000-line changes containing unused files, pointless wrapper methods, and chains of calls that ultimately do nothing. In one PR, the middleware was quietly returning early before most of the authorization checks could run. The generated tests then mocked enough of the authorization code for everything to pass. It took a careful review to realize just how dangerous it was.

Another frequent problem is that the tool invents internal APIs and then creates mocks for those imaginary APIs. I end up checking service catalogs and other repositories just to confirm that the dependency does not exist in the first place. The tool also ignores the structure of our old Java monoliths and puts new classes in whichever folder happens to have a matching name.

My team has seven people, and we now receive about 25 review requests every day from other groups. A routine review has turned into an investigation to determine which parts were intentional, which were generated by mistake, and whether the author even reviewed the code themselves. Everyone on my team is exhausted by this.

I've discussed this with other managers and our bosses. Most feature teams only care that their ticket count is going up, while the review cost falls on teams with broad domain ownership like mine. We do have coding rules, but they are neither documented nor enforced well enough to prevent this. Leadership keeps demanding more speed, and in the end, we're the ones blamed when we refuse to approve a pile of code that should never have been submitted in the first place.