{"slug": "we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesn-t-pay-one", "title": "We measured the \"AI review tax\" across 5,388 repos. The median repo doesn't pay one.", "summary": "An analysis of 5,388 public repositories and 444,225 merged pull requests found that the median repository pays no 'AI review tax,' while a quarter pay a real one. The developer behind the scanner, which is sold commercially, says the cost varies more by language than by project size, with TypeScript repos showing the fastest median time-to-merge for AI-attributed PRs.", "body_md": "The claim you hear from one side is that AI-written code is a review burden everywhere. The claim from the other is that it's free velocity. We read 5,388 public repositories — 444,225 merged pull requests — and both sides are wrong in an interesting way: **the median repo pays no review tax at all, and a quarter pay a real one**. Where the cost lands says more about the repo than about the tools — and which kind of repo yours is turns out to be measurable.\n\nDisclosure up front: I built the scanner this data comes from, and I sell a paid version to teams. That's also why the headline is against my interest — a review tax that landed on everyone would be a better sales pitch. It's just not what the data says, and the data is re-checkable by anyone (see \"Check us\" below).\n\nFor every repo, the last 100 merged PRs, divided into PRs carrying agent authorship and the rest of the same repo. Attribution is commit-level marks only — `Co-authored-by`\n\ntrailers naming a known agent, agent commit identities, agent bot accounts. Nothing is inferred from diff shape, code style, or timing; that would be guessing dressed as measurement.\n\nBecause the comparison stays inside each repository — same reviewers, same conventions, same era — a multiple above 1× means the attributed side took more review; below 1×, less.\n\n*(Full population, backfill complete 2026-08-06.)*\n\nBy language, median time-to-merge multiple: TypeScript 0.43× (442 repos), Python 0.54× (361), Go 0.54× (302), **Rust 0.70× (237)** — the slowest-relative of the big five.\n\nBy project size the spread is flatter than expected: 50k+ stars 0.43×, 10k–20k 0.39×, 5k–10k 0.51×. **Size predicts far less than language does**. The full cuts, with segments below the sample floor withheld rather than estimated, are on the [live page](https://forge.ambera.app/review-tax-index).\n\nThree limitations are load-bearing, and reading the numbers without them produces wrong conclusions:\n\nThe sample self-selects twice, too: these are repositories someone chose to scan plus a curated backfill of well-known projects — a population of repos people care about, not a random sample of software.\n\nEvery repo in the Index is public; every report is a permanent link anyone can re-read; the aggregate recomputes live from the same rows. The full method, signal by signal, including everything it can't see: [forge.ambera.app/methodology](https://forge.ambera.app/methodology).\n\nYou can place your own repo against this population at [forge.ambera.app/review-tax-index](https://forge.ambera.app/review-tax-index) — public repositories only, nothing installed, no account. For a private repo there's a [local CLI](https://forge.ambera.app/scan) that reads via your own `gh`\n\nauth and sends nothing.\n\nThe Index republishes quarterly. Repos already read keep their history, so the next edition carries trend lines: not just where the tax lands, but where it's moving.\n\nIf your team's numbers look different from the population's, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — that disagreement is more informative than agreement.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesn-t-pay-one", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/maki_vlach_289e052694eb2e/we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesnt-pay-one-1bc1", "published_at": "2026-08-13 20:30:56+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 20:49:50.736681+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Ambera"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesn-t-pay-one", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesn-t-pay-one.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesn-t-pay-one.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-measured-the-ai-review-tax-across-5388-repos-the-median-repo-doesn-t-pay-one.jsonld"}}