Reviewing, Approving, and Merging Pull Requests
Everything an agent does lands as an ordinary branch and pull request in your repository (see the Overview). That means you review agent work the same way you review any other change: read the diff, leave feedback, and merge when it looks right. This page explains how reviews and merging work, how to give feedback the agent will act on, and what changes when automatic reviews are turned on.
How merging works by default
By default, automatic reviews are off, and every agent-opened pull request waits for a human. Only a person can merge it. The agent opens the PR, and then it is yours: review the changes, and when they look good, merge the PR (or rebase and merge) yourself. Nothing is merged on your behalf until you say so.
This is the safest default. You see every change before it reaches your default branch, and you decide what ships.
Giving feedback
When you want the agent to do more work on a pull request — make a change, fix something, or take a different approach — leave your feedback as a submitted pull request review. On GitHub that means using Review changes and choosing Approve, Request changes, or Comment, then submitting. A submitted review is the signal SetForth receives and acts on, and the agent will pick up the task again and address what you asked for.
Individual line comments that are not part of a submitted review are not received by SetForth. If you add a single inline comment without submitting it as a review, the agent will not see it and will not act on it. This is useful: you can use standalone line comments for your own notes, reminders, or discussion that are not meant for the agent. Only when you want the agent to respond, gather your comments into a review and submit it.
Resolving merge conflicts
If a pull request develops merge conflicts with your default branch, you do not have to resolve them by hand. Submit a pull request review asking the agent to resolve the merge conflicts. The agent will rebase the branch, resolve the conflicts, and push the updated branch, after which the pull request can be merged normally.
Automatic reviews
If you would rather not review and merge every pull request by hand, you can turn on automatic reviews for a project. When it is enabled, a reviewer agent inspects each agent-opened pull request and merges it only when every acceptance criterion for the task is met. If any criterion is deferred, partially met, or blocked — or anything else looks off — the pull request is not merged automatically and is routed to a human to review instead. In other words, automatic merging happens only on a clean, fully-met result; anything less still comes to you.
Turning it on
You enable automatic reviews from your project's Settings, in the pull request review section. Automatic reviews require that your repository actually lets the agent merge: the repository's branch-protection and review settings must permit it. If those settings would block the agent from merging — for example, a required reviewer or status check the agent cannot satisfy — the project is not eligible, and the settings page shows you which requirements are not met so you can adjust them and re-check. You can turn automatic reviews off again at any time.
You are still responsible for merged changes
Even with automatic reviews on, we strongly recommend that you review all agent changes yourself. Automatic review is a convenience, not a guarantee: SetForth is not responsible for changes that get merged into your repository. You are responsible for reviewing agent output and deciding whether to use it, as described in our Terms of Service. Keep automatic reviews scoped to projects and repositories where that tradeoff makes sense for you.