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.
Where the backlog actually hurts
Every engineering team has a pile of small, well-scoped tickets sitting behind the features people actually want to build. A missing validation, a renamed field, a bug with a clear repro someone already wrote down. Each one takes 20 minutes to an hour. A team doing 20 of those a week loses most of a person’s time to work nobody finds interesting.
There is a second cost, and it is worse than the hours: interruption. A senior engineer stops deep work to fix something small, loses the thread, and the feature that actually mattered slips. The ticket gets done. The thing that was more important does not.
Handing this backlog to juniors to learn the codebase is reasonable on paper. In practice it means review time goes into teaching instead of catching real risk, and the backlog still grows faster than anyone clears it.
What the agent handles
The agent picks up a ticket from your tracker and reads the relevant part of the codebase. Then it writes the change: a bug fix, a small feature, a refactor with a defined scope. It runs your existing test suite first and works inside a branch. Then it opens a pull request with a summary written for a human to scan in under a minute.
It follows a playbook built from your team’s actual conventions - naming, file structure, the patterns you already use - instead of generic best practices that fight your codebase. Past review comments feed back into later tickets, so the same correction never has 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 a senior still decides
Merging is a human decision, every time. Architecture choices, anything with more than one reasonable way to solve it, and every judgment call about product tradeoffs stay with your senior engineers. Writing the first version of the conventions playbook is a joint step: we build it from your codebase, your team corrects it.
Guardrails on every pull request
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 stays limited to the ticket at hand, so no unrelated refactor rides along inside a bug fix. Every action, every file touched and every test run is logged against the ticket ID. A review always traces 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 $3,500 | 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. See 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 were 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 too, whether that is Linear, Jira or 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.