PR Fatigue
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
PR fatigue is when your review queue has 40 open PRs and you've stopped actually reading them. You just scroll, click approve, and move on. Your team is shipping features. Your review quality is in the basement.
Real Talk
PR fatigue is reviewer burnout caused by excessive pull request volume, leading to rubber-stamp approvals, shallow reviews, and bugs slipping through. It's exacerbated by AI-generated PRs and bot PRs (Dependabot, Renovate). Mitigations include WIP limits, rotating review duty, and auto-merging trusted bot PRs.
When You'll Hear This
"Open-PR count is up 3x this quarter — the team is in full PR fatigue." / "Split that PR into three. We're already drowning in PR fatigue."
Related Terms
Bot PR
A bot PR is a pull request opened by an automated system — Dependabot, Renovate, an AI agent — instead of a human. Some are essential (security patches).
Code Review
A code review is when another developer reads your code before it gets merged, looking for bugs, bad practices, or anything confusing.
PR Factory
A PR factory is when you (or your AI) crank out pull requests faster than anyone can review them. Quantity over quality.
Review Fatigue
Review fatigue is PR fatigue's cousin — the mental exhaustion of reviewing code all day. After 8 reviews, you're not actually reading anything.