Why I Built Code Reviews: Feedback at Kilo Speed
Developer Retrospective by Suresh Sivasankaran
I dove into Kilo for the first time on a Monday. By Thursday, the first iteration of Code Reviews was running.
I had heard of Kilo Speed, and I wanted in. Code Reviews was a missing piece in the end-to-end agentic engineering workflow, and I wanted to close that gap.
The Gap That Bugged Me
I’ve been on both sides of the code review bottleneck.
As a junior engineer, I’d push a PR and watch it sit for days. My reviewer was in meetings. Or firefighting production. Or just buried under their own work. By the time feedback came back, I’d already context-switched twice and had to re-read my own code to remember what I was thinking.
As a senior engineer, I saw the other side. I’d have 15 PRs waiting for my attention, and I’d skim the smaller ones just to get through the queue. I knew I was missing things. Everyone did. But there’s only so many hours in a day.
That tension never sat right with me. Code review is supposed to be this learning moment, this quality gate, this place where knowledge transfers across the team. Instead, it had become a waiting room.
What bothered me even more was the tooling fragmentation. You’re building in your IDE. You push. And then suddenly you’re in a completely different platform, waiting for a human to find time. The agentic engineering workflow just... stops.
That felt wrong. If Kilo can help you write code, debug code, architect code, and ship code, why stop at the review?
What Code Reviews Does
Code Reviews is an AI-powered agent that automatically analyzes your pull requests the moment they’re opened or updated. It reads your diffs, understands the changes in context, and posts structured feedback directly in GitHub as inline comments and summary findings.
No manual triggers. No waiting in a queue. Push your code and the review starts.
The feedback covers the areas you’d expect: security vulnerabilities, performance issues, bugs, code style, test coverage, documentation gaps. But you control what it focuses on and how strict it is.
Review Styles:
Strict flags everything. Use it when you really can't afford to miss something.
Balanced is the sweet spot for most teams. Surfaces what matters without noise.
Lenient is a light touch for WIP branches and exploration.
You pick the model (same 500+ options you have in the IDE), set your focus areas, add custom instructions about your codebase conventions, and the agent applies that consistently to every PR.
Why Model Freedom Matters Here
This was important to me: you should have the same model choice and open pricing with reviews that you get everywhere else in Kilo.
Most AI review tools lock you into one model at one price. But different PRs need different things. A quick refactor doesn’t need the same reasoning depth as a security-sensitive change. You should be able to choose the right tradeoff between speed, cost, and capability for each situation.
With Code Reviews, you can. Same tokens, same pricing, same flexibility.
What Actually Changes
The before and after is pretty stark:
Before: Open PR → ping teammate → wait hours → receive feedback when you’ve moved on → context-switch back
After: Open PR → feedback appears in minutes → address comments while everything’s fresh
Every PR gets reviewed. Not just the ones that land when someone’s available. The agent doesn’t have busy days or forget to check the queue.
Junior developers get rich explanations with every suggestion, which turns reviews into teaching moments. Senior developers get a first pass that catches the obvious stuff, so their time goes toward the nuanced decisions that actually need human judgment.
Try It
If you’re already using Kilo:
Make sure GitHub is connected in the Integrations tab
Open the Code Reviews tab in your dashboard
Toggle Enable AI Code Review
Choose your model, style, and focus areas
Select which repos should get automatic reviews
Open a PR
That’s it - the agent handles the rest.
Code Reviews joins Cloud Agents, App Builder and a wave of other new features in closing the loop on the full development workflow. Prototype, build, review, ship. All in one place, all with the same model freedom and open pricing.
Enable Code Reviews, and let me know what you think in our Discord Community!