PR review checklist for agent-assisted code (that reviewers can use in 60 seconds)

Agent-assisted coding becomes a delivery practice when review stays fast and credible. This checklist is designed to be used quickly—ideally pasted into your PR template.

If you want help tailoring this to your repo and risk profile, book a fit call or read the consulting offer.

Author preflight (before requesting review)

• Intent: 2–4 bullets: what problem is being solved, what the agent did, what a human verified.
• Scope: no drive-by refactors mixed with functional changes unless explicitly called out.
• Risk callout: note auth, crypto, payments, migrations, concurrency, or schema changes.
• Tests: new behavior has tests; generated tests include at least one meaningful negative case.
• Rollback: if production behavior changes, how do we revert safely?

Reviewer checklist (60 seconds)

1) Correctness and intent

• The change matches the stated intent; no “extra” behavior slipped in.
• Edge cases are plausible; no silent failure paths.

2) Security hotspots (even if you are not “the security person”)

• Secrets are not introduced or logged.
• AuthZ checks are not bypassed by new shortcuts/helpers.
• User-controlled input is validated/escaped appropriately for the layer.

3) Maintainability

• Names and structure match repo conventions (agents love generic names).
• Dead code removed; no commented-out blocks “just in case.”

4) Operational reality

• Performance impact is sane (N+1 queries, hot loops, unnecessary sync work).
• Observability: logs/metrics make failures diagnosable without PII leaks.

When to escalate

Escalate early if the PR touches secrets, crypto, customer data, migrations, or incident-sensitive paths—those deserve explicit reviewers and often a second pair of eyes outside the agent loop.

Related resources

• AI coding assistant rollout plan
• Security review checklist for AI dev tools and agents
• Printable AI onboarding checklist

Next step

If you want this embedded into your PR templates, CI guardrails, and team training, book a fit call.