It's very easy to build a basic code review tool.
It's hard to build one that developers won't ask you to turn off because of false positives (or one that will miss your next escaped bug)
I think if all the tool does is run a claude code level /review skill. This is a bit of a review theater. It's equivalent to just you writing the code and running /review in a loop (posting "comments" locally, then on another session "answering" the comments)
I wonder how many PRs in the world got to production where several developers commented on each other's code, and none of them read anything, just used their gh cli / MCP to post / answer comments / fix issues on their behalf.
> Can't you simply ask codex in another tab to just do a code review?
You are likely to get better results if you do not use the same model for review that wrote the code. I typically use Opus for code editing and GPT 5.5 for peer review using an automation with skills.
Training set is different between models. If there are gaps in coverage in one model, you want a different model reviewing the work. The second model will its own gaps, but the gap list is not identical.
I recently moved off Cursor's BugBot because it's no longer a flat $40, and I feel a little lost trying to find a viable alternative because there are so many and the pricing kind of sucks for all of them. Curious if anyone has a recommendation.
My team tried coderabbit and qodo and they are both trash compared to a tool we quickly built in-house that is more or less a thin wrapper around claude/codex, along with per-repo skills. PR review is triggered by webhooks from github to the review tool's web app. The tool shared by OP from alibaba certainly does some things ours does not and appears more sophisticated, but we have never had the problems they mention.
"The agent can read full file contents, search the codebase, inspect other changed files for context, and produce deep reviews — not just surface-level diff feedback." our tool does all this too. It catches dumb typos as well as more complicated bugs. Not to mention it is great as a ratchet (https://qntm.org/ratchet). It is not a substitute for reviews from other engineers though, since obviously it does nothing to achieve one of the main goals of code review, which is to socialize knowledge of the codebase.
Alibaba's work here is almost certainly more advanced than what we've done, but ours has been perfectly satisfactory and better than the paid offerings we've tried. I think most teams should not be paying SaaS fees for AI code review, that is the kind of business that mostly should not exist any more.
We've been using Coderabbit, great deal ($30/mo/dev flat) and finds a lot.
I also built a skill I call `/meta-review` that asks Codex, Cursor, and Gemini to review the code (I use Claude Code). It always finds little things claude & I missed.
Is it actually flat fee? I loved Cursor bugbot which was flat fee but they moved to per-run and that killed it for me, but a lot of others are doing the same.
uses a node image installs claude code runs a /review-like command puts inline comments to PR deletes old comments when rerunning
OCR seems cool, but overkill, and I'm definitely not using Code Rabbit after their CEO was on here acting snobbish a while back.
Point being AI code review in Git** itself isn't hard to do and can add a lot of value quickly.
It's very easy to build a basic code review tool. It's hard to build one that developers won't ask you to turn off because of false positives (or one that will miss your next escaped bug)
I think if all the tool does is run a claude code level /review skill. This is a bit of a review theater. It's equivalent to just you writing the code and running /review in a loop (posting "comments" locally, then on another session "answering" the comments)
I wonder how many PRs in the world got to production where several developers commented on each other's code, and none of them read anything, just used their gh cli / MCP to post / answer comments / fix issues on their behalf.
https://codereview.withmartian.com
You are likely to get better results if you do not use the same model for review that wrote the code. I typically use Opus for code editing and GPT 5.5 for peer review using an automation with skills.
Training set is different between models. If there are gaps in coverage in one model, you want a different model reviewing the work. The second model will its own gaps, but the gap list is not identical.
They do open source a fair bit of internal tooling, so it’s always interesting to see their approach
We have our own internal automated review which has shown positive results, but I would love to drop it if I find something better.
Code review is currently our bottleneck, so any possibility of better automating it is welcome.
"The agent can read full file contents, search the codebase, inspect other changed files for context, and produce deep reviews — not just surface-level diff feedback." our tool does all this too. It catches dumb typos as well as more complicated bugs. Not to mention it is great as a ratchet (https://qntm.org/ratchet). It is not a substitute for reviews from other engineers though, since obviously it does nothing to achieve one of the main goals of code review, which is to socialize knowledge of the codebase.
Alibaba's work here is almost certainly more advanced than what we've done, but ours has been perfectly satisfactory and better than the paid offerings we've tried. I think most teams should not be paying SaaS fees for AI code review, that is the kind of business that mostly should not exist any more.
I also built a skill I call `/meta-review` that asks Codex, Cursor, and Gemini to review the code (I use Claude Code). It always finds little things claude & I missed.
Coderabbit just came out with their own PR review UI that's great for big PRs, it groups files together etc. https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/introducing-atlas-the-first-a...
Yea I liked bugbot too but it became pretty pricey.
How do you see CodeRabbit against other AI code review solutions? E.g. cubic.dev, Qodo, Graphite, Greptile, Baz, Augment Code...
An alternative UI to GitHub is well overdue. But once someone will get it right, everyone will copy them...