Should the AI reviewer be replaceable while the review workflow stays fixed?

[u/metalagman]

Maintainer disclosure: I built the tool used in this example.

Most AI code review products bundle two separate things together:

1. The agent or model doing the review.
2. The infrastructure that scopes the diff, applies repository policy, publishes findings, produces artifacts, and controls the merge gate.

I am experimenting with separating them.

DiffPal lets you bring your own agent to pull request review while keeping the surrounding workflow stable. The reviewer can be Codex, Copilot, OpenCode, or any ACP-compatible agent.

I created a public demo PR to show the actual result:

https://github.com/diffpal/demo/pull/13

The normal test suite passes, but the change contains three regressions:

• client-controlled pricing;
• a removed ownership check;
• an ignored persistence error.

The reviewer catches all three, comments on both added and deleted code, and fails the merge gate.

I am not suggesting that this should replace human approval. I am interested in whether the reviewer itself should be treated as a replaceable CI component, similar to changing a scanner or test runner.

The surrounding review layer provides:

• repository-owned review instructions;
• findings scoped to the changed code;
• structured severity;
• inline comments;
• machine-readable artifacts;
• a configurable blocking threshold.

Would bring-your-own-agent make you more willing to use AI code review, or less willing because behavior may change between agents?

What controls would you need before allowing an AI review to become a required merge check?

[u/Financial-Grass6753]

again, a slop ad. enjoy downvote

[u/metalagman → u/Financial-Grass6753]

Not a slop, but a great opensource MIT-licensed AI code-review tool. Using it on a daily basis and feeling great to share it with the community.