Code Reviews

Our code review AI can run and debug code, catching issues that traditional static code analysis tools can’t. Internally we’ve added a list of obvious best practices that Ellipsis should catch, but since every team is different, we’ve made it easy to add your own rules.

If it finds issues, it will leave comments on the PR. If it doesn’t find any issues, it will leave a “Looks good to me!” comment.

By default, Ellipsis will automatically review any pull request that is published as or opened in the “ready to review” state. Draft pull requests aren’t automatically reviewed by default (though you can enable this in the config), but you can always ask Ellipsis to review them by mentioning @ellipsis-dev review this.

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How to Enforce a Style Guide

Ellipsis will “learn” from historical pull request comments to infer your team’s style guide. If you have a specific style guide you’d like to enforce, you can add rules using our UI or to your ellipsis.yaml file.

For example, you might use Ellipsis to make sure the factory pattern is ALWAYS used in your codebase, or to ensure that all new code has corresponding unit tests, or even to enforce anytime a developer modifies a function, they write or update the docstring.

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Configuration

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  confidence_threshold: 0.9

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  rules:
    - "Code should be DRY (Dont Repeat Yourself)"
    - "There should no secrets or credentials in the code"
    - "Extremely Complicated Code Needs Comments"
    - "Use Descriptive Variable and Constant Names"
    - "API routes must have error handling, they shouldn't intentionally return a HTTP 500"
    - "Use retries when calling external API services"
    - "Don't log sensitive data"
    - "Follow the Single Responsibility Principle"
    - "Function and Method Naming Should Follow Consistent Patterns"

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  quiet: true

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  auto_review_enabled: false

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  auto_review_draft: true

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  ignore:
    base: 
      - "staging"  # ignore PRs into the 'staging' branch
    head: 
      - "test/*"   # ignore PRs on branches starting with 'test/'
      - "debug/*"  # ignore PRs on branches starting with 'debug/'

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  enable_approve_prs: true

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Feedback

Ellipsis can learn from your feedback in order to improve. Simply add 👍/👎 emojis to rate review comments. You can also optionally reply in the thread to be specific (no need to tag Ellipsis) - but remember to give 👍/👎 too. Ellipsis will take this into account in all future reviews (on this PR and on others).

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Hide Old Reviews

On long-running PRs, lots of reviews can accumulate and cause clutter. While you can individually click on reviews to hide them, you can also have Ellipsis do it in bulk. If you ask Ellipsis to “hide your old comments,” it’ll hide all its previous reviews to give you a clean slate.

If you’d like to reduce clutter futher, consider quiet mode.