Spotify’s SVP of Technology and Platforms, Tyson Singer, published a 16 September retrospective arguing that the size and complexity limits engineers used to flag risky pull requests may no longer hold now that humans and agents write code together. The company’s merged changes more than doubled year over year, and its rework rate — a metric that weights code by age — stayed flat even as churn rose sharply industry-wide, according to Faros AI’s 2026 report.
The hosts weigh that evidence against Spotify’s own near-miss, in which an automated dependency upgrade passed every check and still failed in production, and against GitHub’s contemporaneous guidance to hold PR limits, not loosen them. Faros’s broader telemetry shows incidents-to-PR ratios up 242.7% and review time up 441.5% across thousands of teams — and neither company has measured the one thing this debate turns on: whether human reviewers can still comprehend pull requests at this new scale.