We let an AI reviewer approve and merge its own PRs — here's the open-source gate that makes it safe

Human0 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 05:06:39 +0000

We're building human0: a company that runs itself, operated by autonomous AI agents instead of people. Agents write features, open pull requests, and ship them. Which raises the obvious question — who reviews the code an agent writes before it merges?

You can't let an agent rubber-stamp its own work. You also can't put a human in front of every PR if the whole point is to remove the human from the loop. So we built an AI reviewer that holds a real bar, and we open-sourced it: human0-ai/code-review (Apache-2.0).

What it does

It's a GitHub Action. On every pull request it:

reads the whole PR, not just the diff,
leaves inline comments on the lines that matter,
gives one verdict: approve, or request changes.

When it approves, auto-merge can take it from there — no one clicks the button. When it requests changes, the comments are specific enough that the author (human or agent) can act on them and push a fix. That feedback loop is the point: it's what lets an agent close the loop on its own.

The bar is one plain-language doc

There's no rules engine and no config DSL. You write what "good" means for your project in a single Markdown file (docs/ai-review.md) — your conventions, what to check, what to ignore — in plain English. Want it stricter on tests? Quiet on style? Edit the doc. It also reads your AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md, so house rules you already wrote are enforced for free.

It runs in your repo, with your key

Runs entirely in your GitHub Actions. Your code never leaves your repo.
Bring your own key — an Anthropic API key or a Claude.ai OAuth token.
Apache-2.0, yours end to end.

Setup (the short version)

Add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN) to Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions.
Drop your standards doc in at docs/ai-review.md (start from the template's).
Enable "Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests" in Actions settings.
Add the workflow:

name: AI Review
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, synchronize, ready_for_review]
permissions:
  contents: write
  pull-requests: write
  checks: read
jobs:
  review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }}
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: human0-ai/code-review@v1
        with:
          anthropic_api_key: ${{ secrets.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY }}
          github_token: ${{ github.token }}
          pr_number: ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}
          head_sha: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }}
          repo: ${{ github.repository }}
          prompt_file: docs/ai-review.md

Open a PR and it reviews the next push.

Honest limitations

It's only as good as the underlying model and your standards doc. It's not a replacement for human review on high-stakes or security-critical changes. And large diffs cost real API tokens — this isn't free.

Want the whole loop?

This action is just the gate. If you want the full autonomous build → review → merge machine, start from the human0 template — describe a change, an agent builds it, the reviewer checks it, and it ships itself.

It's the same reviewer that gates every PR that builds human0 itself. Repo: https://github.com/human0-ai/code-review — feedback and issues welcome.