When the Agent Opens the Pull Request

Coding agents have moved from suggesting lines of code to taking tickets and opening draft pull requests on GitHub, with GitHub reporting roughly one point two million agent contributed pull requests per month. Alex and Jordan look at how that scale changes the job, from Octoverse 2025 showing nearly eighty percent of new GitHub developers using Copilot in their first week to Stack Overflow finding only thirty one percent of developers using agents. They also dig into the review bottleneck, including the sixty six percent who call out code that is almost right, but not quite, and a METR trial where experienced developers measured nineteen percent slower with AI tools. The episode closes with a practical playbook for letting agents take the first draft without giving them the final say.