Not the idealized version. The actual one.

I lead a distributed engineering team at Kaz Software. We ship across multiple projects simultaneously, which means PR queues pile up fast. Two years ago, every review was entirely human. Today, roughly 60% of the first-pass review work is handled by AI before a human engineer ever opens the diff.

This is not a post about what AI could do for your review workflow. This is a walkthrough of what I actually do, the tools I rely on, and where I still refuse to let AI make the call.

Three tools do almost all the work:

GitHub Copilot handles in-editor, inline review and the PR summary layer directly inside GitHub.

Claude Code handles deep architectural review, spec alignment checks, and the pre-commit audit that I run before any significant PR goes up.

Codex CLI handles the command-line tasks: automated diff analysis, generating test scaffolding for uncovered paths, and batch processing when I need to review multiple files with a specific lens.