PR Review Briefs for Coding Agents: Risks First, LGTM Last

By AgentOps Lab

You already paste diffs into an agent. What still fails: rubber-stamp “LGTM,” invented CI green, and review threads that never become a reusable brief. This post is a PR-review ritual for engineers and tech leads—not a job guarantee, not fake earnings screenshots.

You will leave with a brief shape, a severity split (blockers vs nits), and a path to try one installable SKILL.md for free.

The symptom: every PR reinvents the checklist

Typical week:

1. Monday — agent praises style and ignores auth path changes.
2. Tuesday — “LGTM” with no test-gap callout.
3. Wednesday — you re-ask the same five questions the author already answered in the description.
4. Thursday — a silent migration lands because blast radius was never written down.

That is not “the model being dumb.” It is missing review ops. Reviews need a job description the agent can follow: restate intent → map blast radius → rank risks → name test gaps → separate blockers from nits → ask the author ≤5 sharp questions.

Brief shape you can paste into a skill

Intent (1 sentence):
Blast radius: files / APIs / data / auth / migrations / flags
Risks (ranked):
Test coverage vs change:
Blockers:
Nits:
Ask author (≤5):
Suggested merge stance: approve / request changes / needs more context

Rule: the agent must fill blast radius and risks before any praise. If those are empty, the brief is theater.

Blockers vs nits (keep them separate)

Agents love merging categories. Your skill must forbid “nits that sound like blockers” and “blockers buried in a friendly paragraph.”

15-minute drill (use a sanitized PR)

Done looks like: a brief you would paste into the PR as a human reviewer. If you would not hit send, the skill or context is incomplete—not “the model.”

Hard rules worth putting in SKILL.md

• Do not invent CI green, coverage %, or “tests passed”
• Do not encourage merging known security holes
• Do not invent secrets or bypass auth “for convenience”
• If the diff is missing, ask — do not fabricate it

Try the free teaser

Install PR Review Brief from the free Coding Agent Ops teaser (1 skill · sample prompts · PR brief template):

→ Coding Agent Ops free teaser on itch

Hub page: AgentOps Lab — Coding Agent Ops

The full pack ($19) adds bug-repro, refactor plans, test-gap scans, changelogs, incident notes, and more — optional after you like the brief format. No job, promo, or earnings promises. Files only.

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