TJ Miller
Principal at Geocodio and a Laravel developer building Prism, an open-source package for working with AI models in Laravel.
“We went and made a config file that lives in the root of the repo that has basically glob paths for must-have human review, for like auth and migrations … And then if there is anything that needs human review, that blocks it from auto-approving the pull request, because then that means a human has to have the final approach.”
Slightly Caffeinated · Laravel Ecosystem · October 2026
Miller is building an AI code review agent at Luma that can approve pull requests on its own. The guardrail is a plain config file: certain paths always go to a human, and their presence blocks the bot from approving.
Transcript
…to have. Yeah, well, we'll see how that goes. I'm in the weeds of it right now, and I've spent a lot of time iterating on it, but we want to get to a place where we can heavily rely on it. So, you know, the time spent is worthwhile in getting it right, you know, quality over quantity for sure.
…And here's some like AI-based notes for, you know, everything else. So hopefully, all these changes, the AI feedback for the AI reviewer, having that iteration with humans in the future with like comments and emojis and things like that will help. So, I mean, we'll, but it's a lot to put in.
Yeah, we went and made a config file that lives in the root of the repo that has basically glob paths for must-have human review for like auth and like migrations and stuff like that, where it's like that gets called out automatically in the PR, like the agents comment on the PR of like, these things have to be reviewed by a human. And then if there is anything that needs human review, that blocks it from auto-approving the pull request because like then that means a human has to have the final approach. So yeah, it's, it's, it's so funny that we're, we're working on the same project and like things that already exist, co-pilot, uh, code rabbit, like, you know, the services are out there, but we, we want it to really reflect our process and the things that we care about. So even though we've like looked at other products, we've just, we keep coming back to, we really want to build this in-house because there's certain things that we really care about in certain ways. And like we'd rather keep our workflow and like all of that together where, you know, even though these things exist and they're pretty good…
Yeah. Yeah. Same, same reason here. It's just so much cheaper to build our own using our infrastructure stays within AWS Bedrock for privacy, you know, reasons. And again, we can tune it and kind of do what we want with it. And it's so much cheaper than like paying for Copilot or even Codra…
Ours aren't that inexpensive yet. Ours, I think I just looked at one this morning that was $40 or so dollars spend on it, but that was across a PR with like 12 pushes. So it's, you know, it's reviewed it at least 12 times. So it adds up, but I'm trying to bring that cost down a little bit, being a…
Yep. Let's wrap up.
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