A Hands-On Course · 11 lessons

Agent-Assisted Code Review

Reviewing — and authoring — code when agents write most of the diff. Tiered pipelines, the committee pattern, reproduce-before-report, and PRs built to be reviewed.

Short lessons (~5–8 min each), each with one tangible win and a retrieval-practice quiz. Built for engineers who already use AI coding tools and want the non-obvious mechanics.

Grounded in the agentpatterns.ai corpus (CC BY 4.0). Keep the Glossary open as you go.

Part 1 · The Review Crisis

1 Volume vs. Value Agents can open ten times the pull requests in a tenth of the time — and that is exactly why your review queue, not your IDE, is now the thing that decides how fast you ship. 2 Signal Over Volume More comments don't mean a better review. The win is an AI reviewer that stays silent unless it has something high-confidence to say — and a hard rule for the one place silence is a trap.

Part 2 · The Review Architecture

3 Anatomy of Agentic Review Stop asking one model to "find bugs" in a diff. The reviews that catch breaking changes are pipelines that go and look at the rest of the repo first. 4 Tiered & Tunable Review Stop reviewing every PR as if it could take down production. Route depth by risk, dial effort to the runs that pay for it, and calibrate the cutoff instead of guessing it. 5 Structure-Aware Diffs A raw diff is a flat wall of hunks. Label each one by what it touches, and review attention flows to where structure says it matters.

Part 3 · Review Patterns

6 The Committee Pattern One big "find the bugs" prompt has one blind spot. Several narrow reviewers, run in parallel, have different ones — and that difference is the whole point. 7 Reproduce Before Report A reviewer is allowed to suspect anything. The reader is allowed to see only what an independent verifier could actually reproduce. 8 Human-AI Synergy The adoption-rate gap isn't a failure to fix — it's the blueprint for who does what. Agents triage breadth; humans judge intent.

Part 4 · Authoring for Review

9 PR Slicing & Descriptions The cheapest review win happens before review starts — author the PR small, say why it exists, and flag the code that will get deleted. 10 The Feedback-to-Rule Loop The same review comment, written for the third time, is not a comment — it's an unencoded rule asking to be promoted into the harness.

Capstone

11 The Review Decision Table Ten lessons, one reflex: name the review pathology in front of you, then reach for the move that resolves it — not a vaguer instruction to "review harder."