Across the engineering teams I've been part of over the years, there's always some version of the same ritual, usually unnamed. Every Monday, someone posts in Slack: "anyone reviewing my PR?" Then another. Then three more. By Wednesday, the channel is a graveyard of unblocked work. And half the comments, when they finally come, are the same comments from the week before: "extract this", "rename that", "missing test for the null case", "don't use any ". These aren't insights. They're rules. They could live in an AGENTS.md , a linter config, an AI reviewer like Copilot. Sometimes they do. Often they live in senior engineers' heads, surfacing one PR at a time, with their morning attention. PR backlogs and repeated review comments aren't new. They've been a quiet drag on engineering teams for as long as pull requests have existed. What's new is that AI-assisted development has made the problem impossible to ignore.…