🧠 I built a tiny AI code review tool for GitLab – mostly for myself, maybe useful for you too

Rafał Szymański — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 15:46:28 +0000

Hey dev.to! 👋

I wanted to share a small tool I recently built - something that solves a real daily annoyance I had as a developer.

It’s called MergeReque.st, and it helps automate code reviews with AI – without being heavy, complicated, or trying to replace humans.

Not another code quality platform. Just a tool that saves time and repetition. That’s it.

💬 The problem

Like many developers, I noticed I was writing the same code review comments over and over again:

"Please rename this variable to something more descriptive."

"This breaks our project conventions."

Doing this daily started to feel like a waste of time 😩

So I decided to automate the boring parts, while keeping full control over what’s being said.

A small app that:

I wanted to build a working MVP fast, so I used:

Next.js – backend + frontend in one project

Shipfa.st – a great boilerplate for SaaS apps (not sponsored, just genuinely useful)

In short:

Developers who do frequent code reviews
Teams with custom coding standards that get ignored unless enforced
People who want something that just works, without pitching it to 3 managers first

I made it for myself, but if you’re in a similar spot, it might help you too.

🆓 Free plan – 1 MR review per day, to verify if the tool is good for you

💵 $10/month – up to 20 reviews per day (~400/month). To be honest, it’s hard to hit that limit unless you’re doing nothing but reviews.

Here is a movie that shows it in action: