Code Reviews - Ellipsis | AI Code Reviews & Bug Fixes

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.

Requesting a review

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 leaving a comment like @ellipsis review this. Heads up: there’s no autocomplete.

You have Ellipsis only comment if it finds a problem with the “quiet mode” setting. You can also disable automatic reviews entirely.

Enforcing a Style Guide

You can add your own review rules in either the UI or your ellipsis.yaml to customize the review behavior.

For example, you might use Ellipsis to make sure your team NEVER logs sensitive information such as user email address. If a developer opens a pull request that does that, Ellipsis will catch it and leave a comment:

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).

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.

Configuration

Modify confidence_threshold to show fewer/more comments. Increase this to show fewer, but higher quality comments. If there’s too much noise, we suggest 0.9. The default value is 0.7.

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  confidence_threshold: 0.9

You can add rules to enforce your team’s style guide either using the UI or as code in your ellipsis.yaml file. Ellipsis will check for these rules in every review. To add them as code, add a section like this to your ellipsis.yaml file:

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"

Remember, these should be specific to your team’s style guide. We’ve already configured Ellipsis to check for common issues and to infer rules from historical comments.

You can disable auto-review on particular branches by specifying names (or Unix shell-style wildcards). ellipsis.yaml

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/'

You can allow Ellipsis to approve PRs using enable_approve_prs. Note: in common branch GitHub protection configurations, the Ellipsis approval will count towards the approval total and allow the PR to be merged when it otherwise may not be.

version: 1.3
pr_review:
  enable_approve_prs: true

Features

​Requesting a review

​Enforcing a Style Guide

​Feedback

​Hide Old Reviews

​Configuration

Requesting a review

Enforcing a Style Guide

Feedback

Hide Old Reviews

Configuration