AI's Productivity Paradox: Why Code Review Has Become the Critical Bottleneck

While AI has accelerated code generation 60% year-over-year, review capacity hasn't scaled—creating an invisible productivity bottleneck that paradoxically slows shipping despite faster writing. AI-generated code surfaces 1.7× more issues than human code, demanding deeper cognitive effort per PR at precisely the moment volume explodes, triggering context-switching costs that consume up to 50% of developer time. Teams must redesign review workflows around risk-based triage and load visibility, or risk squandering AI's productivity gains in queue buildup.