How reviews work

The shape of a review

When a pull request opens or updates, gittensory CI runs a review in two layers and reports the result in one place:

1. The gate — a deterministic pass that never asks an AI. It runs a fixed set of rules (duplicates, linked issues, merge-readiness, anti-slop, manifest policy) and each rule is off, advisory, or block.
2. The AI review — a dual-model read of the diff that writes review notes and, when you opt in, lets a high-confidence consensus become a blocker.

comment on the PR, plus an optional Gittensory Orb Review Agent check run. The review algorithm is open-source; what changes between repos is the configuration you tune. See Tuning your reviews for the review options and defaults.

1. The gate: advisory vs. block

The gate is deterministic — same inputs, same verdict, no model in the loop. Its master switch is gateCheckMode (off / enabled). Once enabled, each dimension is independently set to one of three modes:

• off — the dimension is not evaluated at all.
• advisory — the finding is surfaced in the comment, but it never blocks the merge.
• block — the finding can become a hard Gittensory Orb Review Agent blocker.

A block outcome fails the gate for any author identically — confirmed- Gittensor-contributor status doesn't change who can be blocked, only the mode chooses which checks are active. Confirmed status is carried through for on-chain scoring, a separate concern from the gate's own merge/close decision.

The gate dimensions

These are the deterministic rules the gate runs, with their default modes:

• Duplicate-PR gate (duplicatePrGateMode, default block) — detects duplicate or superseding PRs.
• Linked-issue gate (linkedIssueGateMode, default advisory) — checks the PR references an issue, as strongly as linkedIssuePolicy asks.
• Quality / merge-readiness score gate (qualityGateMode, default advisory) — the PR-quality score; passes at or above qualityGateMinScore.
• Slop gate (slopGateMode, default off) — the deterministic anti-slop signal. advisory surfaces the slop score and warnings; block also hard-blocks at or above slopGateMinScore (engine default band 60).
• Merge-readiness gate (mergeReadinessGateMode, default off) — a composite readiness check.
• Manifest-policy gate (manifestPolicyGateMode, default off) — when block, the repo's declared policy (required linked issue and test expectations) becomes enforceable. Manual-review path holds are controlled separately by settings.hardGuardrailGlobs.
• PR-size hold (sizeGateMode, default off) — a PR at or above the configured file/line thresholds is held for manual review, never a hard failure.
• Lockfile-integrity gate (lockfileIntegrityGateMode, default off) — flags a lockfile-tamper-risk finding (a resolved/integrity change with no matching version bump, or a dependency pointed off the npm registry).
• CLA / license gate (claGateMode, default off) — CLA / license-compatibility check.
• Self-authored-linked-issue gate (selfAuthoredLinkedIssueGateMode, default advisory) — flags or blocks a PR whose author also opened the linked issue.
• Moderation-rules engine (moderationGateMode, default inherit) — whether the contributor-cap / blacklist / review-nag mechanisms feed a shared, cross-repo violation tally on this repo; inherit defers to the instance-wide default, off/enabled force it per repo.

Which deterministic rules even apply is set by the policy pack (gatePack): gittensor (registry-aware, tracks confirmed-Gittensor- contributor status for scoring) or oss-anti-slop (runs the rules against any author on any repo, with no confirmed-contributor tracking at all).

gate:
  enabled: true
  pack: gittensor
  duplicates: block
  linkedIssue: advisory
  readiness:
    mode: advisory
    minScore: 70
  slop:
    mode: block
    minScore: 60
  mergeReadiness: advisory
  manifestPolicy: block

2. The dual-AI review and consensus

AI review is its own dimension (aiReviewMode, default off). It reads the diff and produces review notes — concrete findings tied to the change, not a vague verdict. Two modes:

• advisory — the AI write-up is posted as notes only. It never blocks.
• block — a dual-model high-confidence consensus defect is allowed to become a blocker.

By default, the blocking decision runs on a pair of free models and only blocks when both models independently agree, with high confidence, on a real defect — no single-model block and no tie-breaker third model, so a confident-but-wrong single model can't block a good PR on its own. An operator can override this per repo (aiReviewCombine: single / consensus / synthesis); in single mode, one reviewer's verdict is the decision.

Bring your own model (advisory only)

With aiReviewByok: true and a configured provider key, the advisory write-up can use a maintainer's own frontier model (aiReviewProvider / aiReviewModel, e.g. claude-3-5-sonnet-latest). The consensus blocker always stays on the free model pair, so BYOK improves the prose without ever changing who can be blocked.

3. The unified review comment

The result is rendered as one in-place comment on the PR — updated in place on each push rather than stacked — when GITTENSORY_REVIEW_UNIFIED_COMMENT is on for the repo. It has three parts, top to bottom:

• The alert — a one-line headline verdict: whether the gate blocks, what the single most important blocker is, or that the PR is clear. This is the line a reader scans first.
• The signal table — a compact row-per-signal summary: each dimension that ran, its state (pass / advisory / block), and a short reason. This is the at-a-glance map of why the verdict came out the way it did.
• Collapsibles — expandable sections for the detail behind each signal: the AI review notes, the slop warnings, duplicate matches, manifest findings. Folded away by default so the comment stays short, opened when a reader wants the evidence.

Who sees the comment, and how much detail it carries, is a repo setting: commentMode chooses the audience (off / detected_contributors_only / all_prs), and publicSignalLevel (minimal / standard) controls how much of the signal detail is published. Private review context (maintainerNotes) is never published to a public surface.

4. The signals behind a verdict

Each row in the signal table comes from a named finding. The common ones you will see:

• secret_leak — the safety scan (GITTENSORY_REVIEW_SAFETY) found a leaked secret in the diff. The same scan also defangs untrusted PR text before the AI reviewer reads it.
• guardrail_hold — the PR touches a path listed in settings.hardGuardrailGlobs. This is a manual-review hold, not an auto-close reason.
• manifest_missing_tests — code changed but the expected test paths (testExpectations) did not.
• Slop score + warnings — the deterministic anti-slop signal. With slopAiAdvisory: true, a free advisory-only ai_slop_advisory finding is added too — it never feeds the score or the gate.
• Duplicate match — the other PR this one duplicates or supersedes.
• AI review notes — the dual-model findings, and (in block mode) any consensus defect.

The check run can carry the same signals at adjustable depth: checkRunMode (off / enabled) publishes the Gittensory Orb Review Agent check, and checkRunDetailLevel (minimal / standard / deep) sets how much the check summary spells out.

Putting it together

A pull request flows through the deterministic gate, then the dual-AI review, and the union of both is rendered as one alert + signal table + collapsibles comment. The gate decides can this merge with fixed rules you can read; the AI review adds judgment as advisory notes, escalating to a blocker only on two-model consensus; and the comment is the single, sanitized place a contributor reads the whole verdict. Tune every mode, threshold, and surface in Tuning your reviews.