Review Fatigue

Easy — everyone uses thisVibecoding

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Review fatigue is PR fatigue's cousin — the mental exhaustion of reviewing code all day. After 8 reviews, you're not actually reading anything. Your LGTMs are doing heavy lifting they shouldn't be.

Review fatigue is a cognitive load issue where reviewers lose effectiveness as the day's review count climbs. Research suggests review quality drops sharply after 3–5 substantive reviews per day. Rotating review duty, capping PR size, and leveraging AI for first-pass triage help mitigate it.

When You'll Hear This

"I hit review fatigue at PR #6 — the rest got skimmed." / "Rotate the review rotation before everyone's permanently in review fatigue."

Related Terms

Code Review

A code review is when another developer reads your code before it gets merged, looking for bugs, bad practices, or anything confusing.

beginnerGeneral Dev

LGTM (Looks Good To Me)

LGTM is the two-word code review approval that can mean anything from 'I carefully reviewed every line and this is perfect' to 'I glanced at the title and...

beginnerVibecoding

PR Fatigue

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.