Review
Before you open or merge a pull request, you can have an agent review the work. Review changes starts a separate conversation in the same task, so the reviewing agent reads the same checkout the author agent wrote.
Start a review
On web and Mac, choose Review, beside Create PR at the top of the inspector. On Mac, while the inspector is hidden, it moves to the task header. You can also choose Review changes in the + menu of the tab strip or in the command palette. On iPhone and iPad, it is in the task’s actions menu. It is unavailable while a task is waiting for approval.
Rivets opens a new draft conversation in a tab named Review, using your default agent, containing:
- The message Review the changes in this workspace.
- An attached
review-guidelines.mdfile holding the effective Code review prompt, filled in with the task’s branch and base branch.
Nothing is sent yet. Edit the message or open the attached guidelines and adjust them for this review, then send.
What the reviewer does
The built-in guidelines ask the agent to:
- Get the diff between the task’s branch and its base with git, including uncommitted and untracked files.
- Flag only discrete, actionable issues introduced by the change, that the author would likely fix.
- Write one brief comment per issue, explaining the conditions under which it occurs and how severe it is.
- Ignore trivial style.
- Prefer returning no findings over weak ones.
- Not change any files.
Findings are listed most severe first, each with its file and line. If there are none, the agent says so in one sentence.
Because the review runs in its own conversation, you can pick a different agent or model for it than the one that wrote the code. Choose it before sending.
Customize the review prompt
The Code review prompt is one of Rivets’ customizable prompts, in the Agents group under Settings › Prompts. Edit it for your account or, as an owner, for the organization or a single repository. It supports two placeholders:
| Placeholder | Replaced with |
|---|---|
{{branch}} |
The task’s branch. |
{{baseBranch}} |
The branch the task merges into. |
A repository-level prompt is the place for project-specific review rules, such as areas to scrutinize or conventions to enforce. It takes precedence over everyone’s own version. See Custom prompts.
Read the diff yourself
The Changes tab lists every changed file with its line counts, and its tab shows how many files changed. Open a file to see its diff in Unified or Split layout. Every client uses the same diff viewer, and files in Files are highlighted the same way. A changed image shows its current version. Changes update live while an agent is working. See Pull requests and merging.
To undo a file’s uncommitted changes, see Discard changes.
Act on review feedback
Once the pull request is open, reviewer comments from GitHub appear in the Checks tab as unresolved threads. Choose Fix on a thread to send it straight to the agent, in the conversation you are on. On web, View opens the thread on GitHub. See Pull requests and merging.
To act on the review conversation’s findings, switch back to the original conversation and ask the agent to address them, or send follow-ups in the review conversation itself.