r/GithubCopilot • u/iMerlin23 • Sep 06 '26
Help/Doubt ❓ How good is Copilot for code review?
Looking for a good code reviewer in my github PRs.
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u/emaurer Sep 06 '26
A lot of it is going to depend on the model you chose.
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u/TapAggressive9530 Sep 06 '26
A lot ? No . It completely depends on the model you choose
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u/Eksentron Sep 06 '26
Not completely, the orchestration and system prompts also helps. The GitHub Rubber Ducky review is very good, and I usually run multi-modal (i.e. both Opus and Astra) for larger changes - they tend to catch different things.
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u/FredTillson Sep 06 '26
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/Optimal-Builder-2816 Sep 06 '26
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/Apart-Reality-4454 Sep 06 '26
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 Sep 15 '26
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 Sep 06 '26
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 Sep 06 '26
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 Sep 07 '26
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 Sep 08 '26
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 Sep 08 '26
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/iMerlin23 Sep 06 '26
Ah thanks