Introducing Custom Standards & Instructions in Code Reviewer!

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We’ve heard your feedback—and we’re thrilled to announce an exciting update: you can now customise RovoDev Code Reviewer with your team’s own standards, patterns, and instructions!

Why are we doing this?

Every team has unique ways of working and different standards to enforce, and generic code review bots often miss the mark. With this release, you can teach Code Reviewer exactly what matters to your team—whether it’s enforcing logging standards, feature flag gating, privacy and security measures, or making sure your proprietary frameworks are understood.

How it works?

You can now commit a '.rovodev/.review-agent.md' file in your repo and describe your standards in natural language. Reviewer will follow your rules to identify violation of patterns and generate more targeted and relevant suggestions!

For example, if your team uses a specific logger library with a custom wrapper to stay compliant and avoid leaking sensitive information, you could include this instruction in the file:

# Custom standards to enforce in atlascode-demo

## Logging standards

### Avoid leaking sensitive information
What: Developers should avoid logging sensitive information.
Why: Because we feed our logs to 3rd providers, and we need to avoid giving them PIIs.
When: You find code changes that logs PIIs, you should reminder devs to stop logging PII and use hashed values instead.

### Use the compliant logging library
What: Developers should use the approved and wrapped Log4js logger to produce error and analytic logs.
Why: Because the wrapped log4js logger has built-in security and privacy measures to stop leakage.
When: You find code changes that use the default nodejs console log, or other logging libraries other than the wrapped Log4js logger, you need to remind the dev to use the approved logger and why.

Code Reviewer will then use this to conduct additional reviews that focus on your custom instructions, with clear explanation of why it thinks it’s a problem, and recommendations to fix it:

Pro tips for better results

1. Write clear instructions: The results from Code Reviewer depend on the quality and clarity of your instructions. Please follow the use guide to help the agent understand your intentions.

2. Start small: Code Reviewer reads the instruction file from your working branch, allowing you to begin with a few use cases. Write instructions on a branch, introduce a few test cases, and raise a few PRs to test if your instructions work well.

3. Keep iterating: Like with any AI agent, you may not get it right the first time. Gather feedback from your team’s PRs and continue updating the instructions to meet your team’s needs.

How does this help your team?

• Surface what matters: The Reviewer will flag issues that are truly important to your codebase, based on your own rules.

• Enforce standards: Leverage Reviewer to be your watchdog, and catch standards and compliance violations that can easily escape the human eye before the code is merged to production.

• Accelerate onboarding: New team members instantly get feedback aligned with your standards.

Common Use cases

• Enforce structured logging and avoid bad patterns like leaking sensitive information in logs

• Ensure risky changes are feature-gated

• Catch API security pitfalls unique to your stack

• Watch for a11y or i18n breaches

• Make Reviewer aware of your design system and frameworks

Get started

If this sounds like exactly what you needed (or waited for) then let’s get you setup!

Follow this user guide to get started: Custom Code Reviewer Instructions

Need a bit of help creating and testing your prompts?

Follow this post to learn the shortcuts to creating, testing, and tweaking custom review instructions right from your own machine with Rovo Dev CLI.

Tell us what you think

We're always improving Code Reviewer, and we’d love to hear what you think.

To give us feedback, use the ratings on each Code Reviewer comment and add your detailed feedback in the box that appears. You can also leave your comments here on the Community site.