An agent that writes the pull request,
a senior who decides if it merges
Most engineering teams lose hours a week to small, well-defined tickets: a field to add, a bug with a clear repro, a refactor someone already scoped. A coding agent takes the ticket, writes the change against your own codebase conventions, runs the existing test suite, and opens a pull request. It never touches main directly, and a senior developer makes the call on every merge.
The role today
A backlog of small, well-scoped tickets sits behind the bigger features engineers would rather be building: a missing validation, a renamed field that needs updating in six places, a bug with a clear repro someone already wrote down. Each one takes 20 minutes to an hour, and a team doing 20 of those a week loses most of a person’s time to work that nobody finds interesting.
The second cost is interruption. A senior engineer context-switches out of deep work to fix something small, loses the thread, and the actual feature slips. The ticket gets done, but at the cost of the thing that mattered more.
The third is that juniors often get handed this work to learn the codebase, which is reasonable, but it means review time goes into teaching rather than catching real risk, and the backlog still grows faster than it clears.
What the agent takes over
The agent picks up a ticket from your tracker, reads the relevant part of the codebase, and writes the change: a bug fix, a small feature, a refactor with a defined scope. It runs your existing test suite before doing anything else, works in a branch, and opens a pull request with a summary of what changed and why, written for a human to scan in under a minute.
It follows a playbook built from your team’s actual conventions - naming, file structure, patterns you already use - rather than generic best practices that fight your codebase. Memory of past review comments feeds back into later tickets, so the same correction does not have to be made twice.
Typical scope: bug fixes with a clear repro, small well-defined features, refactors someone has already scoped, test coverage for existing code. Anything touching payments, auth, data migrations or production infrastructure routes straight to a human instead of being attempted.
What stays with humans
Merging is a human decision, every time. Architecture choices, anything with more than one reasonable way to solve it, and all judgment calls about product tradeoffs stay with your senior engineers. Writing the initial conventions playbook is a joint step - we build the first version from your codebase, your team corrects it.
Guards
The agent never pushes to main and never merges its own pull request. The full test suite has to pass before a PR opens at all. Scope is limited to the ticket at hand - no unrelated refactors slipped into a bug fix. Every action, every file touched, every test run is logged against the ticket ID, so a review is always traceable back to what the agent actually did and why.
Price and timeline
| Option | Price | What it covers | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency runs it | from $2,500 + support plan | Agent built, tuned and supervised by us on your repo, monthly review of its output | 2 to 3 weeks |
| Full control, handover-ready | from $4,200 | Same agent on your own infrastructure and keys, full documentation, your team runs it without us | 3 to 4 weeks |
Running cost is usually $20 to $100 a month in model usage, depending on ticket volume.
Related
See the AI agents service page for how we scope and build agents generally, and development if the work is closer to a full project than a recurring agent. Within this group: code reviewer agent, QA and test agent, and DevOps and release agent cover the rest of the pipeline this agent feeds into. For the automation version of code review as a one-time setup, see automate code review. Real builds behind the numbers above: the ProBay AI agent team case study and the seven-channel AI sales agent case study, both tested the same way before going live.
Have a backlog of small tickets nobody wants? Get in touch and we will scope what a coding agent could take off your plate first.
FAQ
How much does a coding agent with review cost?
From $2,500 for one codebase with a defined scope (bug fixes, small features, refactors), live in 2 to 3 weeks. A second codebase or a wider scope usually runs $4,000 to $6,000.
How long before it opens its first real pull request?
2 to 3 weeks: about a week to learn your conventions and wire into CI, the rest testing it against real, already-closed tickets before it works on open ones.
Which tools and languages does it work with?
GitHub or GitLab, your CI pipeline, your linter and test runner, your ticket tracker (Linear, Jira, GitHub Issues). It works in the languages your codebase already uses; we do not introduce a new stack to fit the agent.
What happens if it writes something wrong?
The test suite has to pass before a pull request opens, and the change sits as a normal PR until a senior developer approves it. Nothing merges on its own. If a ticket is ambiguous or touches something risky, the agent flags it instead of guessing.
Does it see our whole codebase and client data?
It reads the repository and the ticket it is working on, scoped to the files that ticket touches. It does not get access to production data, secrets or infrastructure beyond what a pull request needs. Every action is logged.