Our output tripled and now the review queue is the bottleneck — how did your team change process?

We added a second required reviewer, reasoning that more eyes would catch more. Throughput halved, both reviewers assumed the other was reading carefully, and the two worst bugs of the quarter went through with two approvals each. We reverted it after five weeks. Diffusion of responsibility is real and adding people to a review is the wrong lever.

Caps produced pure theatre for us: seven PRs that had to be merged in order, each individually reviewable and collectively incomprehensible, which is worse than one honest large one. What actually worked was requiring the author to write the PR description by hand, with no generation, covering what changed, what they considered and rejected, and what they are least sure about. It takes ten minutes and it is a filter, because anyone who cannot write it has not read their own diff and the PR goes back before a reviewer touches it.

Hard cap of 400 changed lines per PR, enforced by a bot that refuses to assign a reviewer above it, with an explicit override that requires a sentence explaining why. Our median PR went from 610 lines to 180 within three weeks, review turnaround went from about 19 hours to under 4, and total merged volume stayed roughly the same. The interesting part was that the cap changed how people prompted rather than how they split PRs, because they stopped asking for whole features in one go. It has held for eight months.

We measured review time per hundred lines before we changed anything, which I would recommend before you pick a fix. Ours came out at roughly 11 minutes per hundred lines for hand written code and 17 for generated code, because reviewers were checking for plausible looking nonsense as well as correctness. That number is the argument you take to your lead: it is not that there is more code, it is that each line costs more to review than it used to.

Cap the diff, make the author write the description, and make the person who generated it the person who is paged when it breaks. The third one fixes more than the first two.