Interesting. For example, GitHub’s built in Copilot review for example will checkout the whole repo and do a broad review. I found it to be WAY better than our prior CI reviews that just looked at diff and had TONs of false positives. (We have also built our own review tools like Copilot that check out repo and they are similarly league ahead IMO than diff reviewers.)
I found diff reviewers so heavy in false positives, all my coworkers just ignored them.
This is only true if you only run the code reviewer in the final PR.
The way we set it up was that the code review responded to two signals:
1. GH PR webhook
2. The exact same review agents running as an MCP tool that the local agent can invoke before pushing.
Practically, what this means is that it's OK to have a false positive because the local agent can make the check with the full context.
This would be the same as if the entire team used Codex and, for example, had a sub-agent configured to run code reviews using a smaller model. In this case, the benefit to this tool-based approach is that the exact same agent works for all harnesses across a team and also works in the PR itself.
I found diff reviewers so heavy in false positives, all my coworkers just ignored them.