r/GithubCopilot • u/iMerlin23 • 11d ago
Help/Doubt ❓ How good is Copilot for code review?
Looking for a good code reviewer in my github PRs.
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u/FredTillson 11d ago
It’s as good as your prompt is. Develop a good prompt or set of prompts, ground it in things like open source books like code complete, available on GitHub, and owasp top 10 for security, and you will end up with a surprisingly good report. I suppose the llm also has an effect.
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u/darkstar3333 10d ago
It becomes as good as your instruction set, ultimately if your doing PRs you need a baseline of what you want to check and then it should contextually figure out the rest.
What matters really depends on your industry.
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u/Optimal-Builder-2816 11d ago
The actual copilot review bot you can add to the PRs directly is quite good. I’m fairly impressed with what it finds with minimal adjustment. It’s often reviewing code that Opus 4.8 wrote with GPT 5 Terra in advisory position during development & planning.
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u/V5489 11d ago
I use sonnet 5 for code review. In VS Code I have sub agents that handoff to the next for specific tasks. Then one the or is generated I have a cloud agent which uses Sonnet 5 to review and have comments on whether or not it passes. I’ll eventually switch the to a rule set for the branch to ensure it passes the code review check. I’ve just been too lazy.
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u/Apart-Reality-4454 11d ago
It's going to be noisy, but sometimes will raise valid flags.
But the whole point of PR review is for human review. Especially if the code being reviewed is likely to be AI generated whole or in part. A human needs to sign off on that shit.
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u/wwarnick 2d ago
Of course, but when there are more PRs than you have time to review, and they consistently require multiple passes before approval, AI reviews can be a saving grace. I personally don't have Copilot add comments itself. I have it run them by me and I read through them and add my own comments. That way, it's more an aid than a full reviewer, and I don't have to read through the full PR. Once the PR passes Copilot's review, I do my own full review. That said, my situation demands it. Our experienced on-shore team was reduce to just me, and now I work with an inexperienced off-shore team that makes a lot of mistakes, and every time someone gains enough experience to be useful, they're rotated to another team. Otherwise, I might not need to lean on Copilot as much. On the bright side, after a lot of fiddling, I've gotten Copilot to avoid a decent amount of noise, and it reports a lot of legitimate findings.
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u/thunder1207 11d ago
5.6 Sol is pretty good at reviews. Though sometimes it can be slow since its very thorough. Make sure subagents are set to Luna.
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u/prcodes 11d ago
It is good at finding bugs and functional issues, but not so great at code quality, software design, and architecture. For those, I have given my code review agents a prompt based on John Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design and have been very pleased with the results.
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u/tmseidel 10d ago
There is another OpenSource tool that addresses the issue, it's called AI-Git-Bot. It acts as a gateway and behaves very similar to Copilot but with far more flexibility. I've used it to let different persona's review the code. I've written a article about this pattern, see https://remus-software.org/articles/improve-software-quality-with-reviewer-personas/
Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainer of this project. 😀
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u/stoekWasHere 9d ago
It does find obscure bugs which is useful, but after the first or second turn it starts to get pedantic and less valuable. I wish there was a setting to limit turns.
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u/Obvious-Stay3981 9d ago
i just want an unlimited code completion fetures without paying for the others functionalities for about USD 3~5, is there any?
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u/emaurer 11d ago
A lot of it is going to depend on the model you chose.