Do you automate code reviews on GitHub?

Developers love submitting Pull Requests (PRs) but far fewer enjoy reviewing them. In particular, when Sprint Review approaches, developers get tunnel vision and only focus on tasks they've been assigned. By leveraging AI agents, you can catch many problems and gotchas in your PRs early, buying your senior devs more time (and sanity!) to review higher quality code.

Video: GitHub Copilot code review (1 min)

In a perfect world, reviewing a PR would simply be rubber-stamping perfect code. In reality, reviewers spend a lot of time flagging comments, typos, linting problems and, eventually bugs. This takes time away from focusing on more valuable concerns like scalability, maintainability, extensibility, and, ultimately the longevity of the code.

Enter AI agents. AI Agents such as GitHub Copilot are great at improving code quality before putting the PR in front of a senior. By making your code more enjoyable to review, you'll find people won't disappear under a rock whenever you ping them with a PR.

There's a few agents developers can choose for their PR reviewing needs.

GitHub Copilot Code Reviews (⭐Recommended)

GitHub Copilot Pro users may request code reviews from GitHub Copilot manually, or configure automatic code reviews by GitHub Copilot whenever they make a Pull Request.

GitHub Copilot can also be given specific instructions to follow when reviewing PRs. To set this up you can place custom instructions inside of a .github/copilot-instructions.md file.

// .github/copilot-instructions.md 

When performing a code review, please finalize your review by saying "But what do I know, I'm just Cleverbot 2.0"

Figure: A set of custom instructions for GitHub Copilot to use when reviewing Pull Requests

Configuring GitHub Copilot Code Reviews

Organization Level

GitHub Copilot may be configured to automatically review PRs and provide suggestions at the GitHub organization level. You have the option to configure which repos within your organization will be reviewed automatically and which branch names or patterns these reviews will apply to.

For more information about how how to configure GitHub Copilot code reviews at the organization level, refer to GitHub's documentation.

Repo level

Allows the same rule sets and pattern matching as above but specific to one repository.

For more information refer to GitHub's documentation for configuring automatic code reviews at the repo level.

Account

GitHub Copilot Pro users have the option of enabling GitHub Copilot reviews for every PR they create. This means that all GitHub Copilot users have the option of enabling automatic reviews for any repo they contribute to, even if the owner of the repo doesn't have a GitHub Copilot Pro subscription themselves.

For more information refer to GitHub's documentation for enabling automatic code reviews.

Cursor's BugBot

Cursor's BugBot allows you to configure automatic code reviews for a specific repo within Cursor. If you're happy with the suggestions that Cursor has made you can click the "Fix in Cursor" button at the bottom of its comments to apply the fix in your Cursor IDE. In most cases BugBot requires a paid subscription. For more information, refer to Cursor's documentation

CodeRabbit

CodeRabbit works with VS Code as well as all of its forks (including Cursor) using an IDE Extension. Using the extension, developers can request code reviews before creating a PR. Similar to Cursor and GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit can review PRs on GitHub. It comes with a generous 14 day trial. For more information visit CodeRabbit's website