Your team's coding rules aren't in the prompt, they're in the ingest
Every AI code reviewer claims it respects your team's standards. Very few can tell you what those standards actually are. The test is mechanical. Ask the tool, or the vendor, one question: where do my rules live? If the honest answer is "we loaded a generic style guide plus whatever your PR description happened to say", then your standards aren't in the model at all. The reviewer is running on…
Many AI code reviewers claim to respect your team's standards, yet few can clearly articulate what those standards are. To truly test a reviewer's adherence to your team's guidelines, ask the crucial question: where are your rules stored? If the response is that the model only utilized a generic style guide along with whatever is mentioned in the pull request description, then the reviewer's standards are not embedded within the AI.
Genuinely compliant reviewers differ in structure. Their standards serve as an input, not just an expectation. They pull from your rule files, linter configurations, past review comments, and occasionally your documentation. When a comment arises, you can ask exactly which rule was triggered and receive a configuration line in response rather than a general model-generated explanation. This is the essential test for rule adherence.
To evaluate a reviewer, consider this checklist during your trial:
1. Does it accept a rules file, or does it only consider the PR context?
2. Can it pinpoint the exact rule that caused a comment?
3. Does it evolve to match your team's historical review style, or does it start anew with every run?
4. Is a "rule" something you can view, read, and modify through a user interface?
If any of these four criteria are absent, you have purchased a highly verbose spellchecker that is merely trained on GitHub. The true litmus test is whether your own reviewer can replicate one of your team's past review decisions using only your actual rules file. Perform this evaluation before deploying the AI reviewer to production PRs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
