Build Your Own AI Code Review Workflow in 5 Minutes with Github Actions

Curious how well a large language model (LLM) can review your code? In this post, I'll show you how to set up a custom AI-powered code review tool in just 5 minutes using GitHub Actions.

Prerequisites

This article assumes some level of familarity with Javascript and Github Actions.

The Idea

We'll build a GitHub Actions workflow that passes a pull request's changeset to ChatGPT. We'll prompt ChatGPT to review the changes and provide feedback. We'll then take its response and post it back to the original PR so that the PR author can see the feeback.

This is a very simple and straight forward way to see how simple it is to integrate LLMs into your workflow right now.

Step 1: Get an API Token for your LLM

First, you'll need an API token to programmatically access ChatGPT. You'll also need permission to add secrets to your GitHub repository or organization.

Once you have your API token, add it to your repo or org secrets. We will reference the secret in our Github Actions workflow. A good name for your Open API token would be OPEN_API_KEY.

Step 2: Create a Github Action

With your API token ready, it's time to wire everything up into Github Actions. Our workflow should run whenever a PR is created or when new commits are pushed to an existing PR. When the workflow runs, it will:

• Pull down the changeset and then pass the changeset into our code review script.
• Use daves-dead-simple/open-ai-action to pass our prompt to Open AI
• Comment the output back to the original pr.

Here's what a workflow file may look like:

name: LLM Code Review
on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - whichever-branch-you-want-code-review-for
    types:
      - opened # when a PR is opened
      - synchronize # when code is pushed to a pr

jobs:
  code-review:
    runs-on:
      - ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout PR branch
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 20

      - name: Get Diff
        id: diff
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          echo "changeset<<EOF" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          echo "$(gh pr diff ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} --repo "${{ github.repository }}")" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          echo "EOF" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

      - name: Run AI code review
        uses: daves-dead-simple/open-ai-action@main
        id: code-review
        env:
          OPEN_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OPENAI_API_KEY }}
        with:
          prompt: |
            Please code review the following changeset: ${{ steps.get_diff.outputs.changeset }}

      - name: Comment on PR with AI review
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          gh pr comment ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} \
            --repo "${{ github.repository }}" \
            --body "${{ steps.code-review.outputs.completion }}"

This workflow will run everytime a PR is open or updated (i.e., when new commits are pushed). It uses the github CLI to fetch the diff and then pass it along to Chat GPT along with instruction for what to do with the changeset we are sending it. The LLM will in turn give us its response which we post back to the original PR.

Conclusion

This is a very simple way to integrate OpenAI or any other LLM into your dev workflow. You can easily iterate on this idea to not only let users pick the model and provider of their choice, but even provide custom rules or instructions to the LLM.