Can an agent do code review?
Mostly, as the first pass rather than the last. An agent catches the mechanical problems reliably and never gets bored on the four hundredth PR. It cannot tell you the change is a bad idea, which is what senior review is for.
- Hours back per week
- 6
- Human cost
- €2,000–4,000/mo of senior engineering time
- Agent cost
- €30–90/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Catch bugs and edge cases
YESNull handling, off-by-one, unhandled errors, the missing await.
Security review
MOSTLYStrong on injection, secrets and auth patterns. Not a substitute for a real audit.
Style and convention
YESConsistently, and without the social friction of a colleague nitpicking.
Check test coverage
YESNotices the untested branch and the test that would pass either way.
Judge the approach
HALFIt reviews the diff. Senior review is about whether this was the right diff at all.
- Yours
Approve and merge
NOT YETAccountability needs a name attached.
3/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Approval
- Architectural judgement
- Deciding a change should not exist
How this goes wrong
Comment fatigue. An agent that leaves twenty low-value comments per PR trains the team to ignore all of them, including the one that mattered.
What it needs access to
- Git repository
- CI
- Static analysis
- Issue tracker
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my first-pass code reviewer. On each PR, comment only on things that matter: correctness bugs, unhandled errors, security issues, missing or meaningless tests, and breaking changes to a public interface. Do not comment on formatting the linter already handles, and do not leave more than five comments — if there are more, summarise the pattern instead. For each comment, state the specific failure case, not a general principle. Say clearly when you think the approach itself is wrong rather than only reviewing the details. Never approve, never merge.
Questions people ask
Does it replace human review?
It replaces the tedious layer, which frees reviewers for the layer that matters. Teams that removed human review entirely find out later, in production, what the agent could not see.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Git repository and CI, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a code review agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.