AI code review tools

AI code review tools, compared honestly

CodeRabbit, Greptile, GitHub Copilot code review, Graphite, Qodo, Cursor BugBot and deck do different jobs. What each kind of tool is for, and how they fit together.

"AI code review" now covers two quite different kinds of tool. Picking well starts with knowing which job you need done.

Kind one: bots that review pull requests

CodeRabbit, Greptile, GitHub Copilot code review, Graphite's reviewer, Qodo Merge and Cursor BugBot read a pull request and leave comments. They differ in how much of the codebase they consider, how noisy they are, which platforms they support, and what they cost. They are good at finding slips a tired human would miss.

What they do not do is transfer understanding. After a bot review, the code may be better, and the person approving it may still not know what was decided.

Kind two: your agent showing you its work

deck is the second kind. It does not review anything by itself. It gives the agent that wrote the code (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Amp, anything with a shell) a way to show you the change: one claim at a time, the lines that prove it lit beside it, charts for behaviour over time, and a place to disagree on the exact line. The same agent answers, in the same session.

Which do you need?

• "We miss bugs in review." A review bot helps.
• "Nobody understands what the agent changed." You need the agent to show its decisions. That is deck.
• "Our PRs are too big to review." Split them into concerns; deck can walk each one as a chapter.
• "The bot's comments are noise." Fewer, better comments help. So does reviewing decisions instead of lines.

They fit together

A sensible setup for a team using coding agents: the agent shows you its decisions before the PR (deck), a bot checks the PR for slips, and a human approves knowing what was decided.