Verified against GitHub Copilot code review · 2026-06-28
Point Copilot's automated PR review at the risk that actually matters
A PR description addendum that steers GitHub Copilot's automated code review toward the specific risk areas of a change, instead of an evenly-distributed pass over the whole diff.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
COPILOT REVIEW FOCUS What this PR does Adds a bulk-delete endpoint for admin users to remove multiple flagged comments at once. Review these areas with the most scrutiny, in this order 1. Whether the bulk-delete endpoint checks that every comment ID belongs to the requesting admin's organization before deleting. 2. Whether the delete is wrapped in a transaction. 3. Rate limiting on the new endpoint. Known tradeoffs already discussed — do not re-raise these unless you disagree with the reasoning We chose a hard delete over a soft-delete flag for this table, per the retention policy discussion in #482 — this was intentional. Flag anything outside this list too, but lead with the areas above. If a comment applies to a line only because of a broader pattern repeated across this file, say so once and name the pattern rather than leaving a separate near-duplicate comment on every line it appears on.
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Why this works
GitHub's Copilot code review scans the whole diff and leaves inline comments, but it has no way to know which part of a large diff the author is actually unsure about, so by default it distributes attention roughly evenly across the changed lines. Naming risk areas up front works the same way it does with a human reviewer — a PR description that says please focus on X changes where a reader concentrates their limited attention, and it changes where Copilot's review concentrates its comments rather than paging through hunks in file order. Listing known tradeoffs already discussed suppresses a specific kind of noise: without it, the review will often re-raise a decision the team already made deliberately, which is exactly what trains people to skim past its comments instead of reading them. Asking it to name a repeated pattern once rather than comment on every line it appears on closes off the review feature's tendency to leave five near-duplicate line comments for the same code smell instead of one comment that actually explains the pattern.
Verified against
GitHub Copilot code review GA, 2026 · 2026-06-28
Changelog
- 2026-06-28 — Initial publish, verified against GitHub Copilot code review GA.
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