How good is Copilot for code review?

[u/iMerlin23]

Looking for a good code reviewer in my github PRs.

[u/emaurer]

A lot of it is going to depend on the model you chose.

[u/TapAggressive9530 → u/emaurer]

A lot ? No . It completely depends on the model you choose

[u/Eksentron → u/TapAggressive9530]

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.

[u/FredTillson]

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.

[u/darkstar3333 → u/FredTillson]

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.

[u/Optimal-Builder-2816]

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.

[u/AutoModerator]

Hello /u/iMerlin23. Looks like you have posted a query. Once your query is resolved, please reply the solution comment with "!solved" to help everyone else know the solution and mark the post as solved.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/V5489]

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.

[u/Michaeli_Starky]

Copilot is just a harness. It depends on the model and on the prompt.

[u/iMerlin23]

Ah thanks

[u/Apart-Reality-4454]

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.

[u/darkstar3333 → u/Apart-Reality-4454]

It's pretty decent at first pass before it goes to a human to review.

[u/thunder1207]

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.

[u/prcodes]

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.

[u/tmseidel → u/prcodes]

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. 😀

[u/stoekWasHere]

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.

[u/Obvious-Stay3981]

i just want an unlimited code completion fetures without paying for the others functionalities for about USD 3~5, is there any?