# How to Set Up Claude Code Review for Your Pull Requests

> Claude Code Review is now generally available: AI agents review every GitHub pull request in minutes. A practical setup guide for tech leads and busy backend engineers.

- URL: https://hsalem.com/claude-code-review-setup/
- Author: Hassan Salem (https://hsalem.com/about/)
- Published: 2026-10-19
- Topics: AI, Software Engineering, News

If your team writes most of its code with AI agents, you know the new problem. Pull requests are huge, and the human reviewer is now the slowest part of the process. On October 15, Anthropic made Claude Code Review generally available, and it is built for exactly this queue.

## What Claude Code Review does

When a pull request is opened on GitHub, several agents read the diff and the code around it. A verification step then checks each finding against the code and drops false alarms. What is left arrives as inline comments, ranked by severity, plus a short summary. It never approves or blocks a pull request. The merge decision stays with your team.

What changed with the general release: most reviews now finish in about 6 to 10 minutes, down from around 20 in the preview. Admins can also pick a review level per repository: Quick, Standard or Deep. Details are in the [official announcement](https://claude.com/resources/articles/code-review-is-now-generally-available).

## Who it helps

- **A tech lead of a small team.** Everyone ships with agents, and you are the bottleneck. Put the payments repository on Deep and the internal admin tool on Quick, and spend your own time on design questions.
- **A backend engineer who reviews a lot.** Let Claude do the first pass for logic errors and broken edge cases, so you read with a list in hand instead of starting from zero.

## How it is used today

Anthropic runs it on its own pull requests. They report that the share of PRs with real review comments went from 16% to 54%, and engineers marked under 1% of the findings as wrong. On PRs over 1,000 lines, 84% got findings, with 7.5 issues on average. These are Anthropic's own numbers, not an independent test. Since the launch, a lot of the discussion is about one file: `REVIEW.md`, a file in your repo that tells the reviewer what your team cares about.

## How to set up Claude Code Review

1. An Owner of your Claude organization turns it on in the admin settings, installs the Claude GitHub App and selects repositories.
2. Start small. New repositories default to a review after every push, which costs the most. Set "Review runs" to "Once after PR creation" or manual, and set a monthly spend limit.
3. Add a `REVIEW.md` at the repository root and merge it to a protected default branch. Reviews read it from there, never from the PR itself.
4. On any pull request, comment `@claude review` to start a review by hand.

A simple `REVIEW.md` to start with:

```markdown
# Review instructions

## What Important means here
Only mark Important if it breaks behavior, leaks data or blocks a rollback.
Style and naming are Nit at most.

## Cap the nits
Report at most five Nits per review.

## Do not report
* Lint and formatting, CI already checks this
* Generated files under src/gen/

## Always check
* New API endpoints have an integration test
* Log lines do not contain emails or user IDs
```

## The honest part

It is only for Claude Team and Enterprise plans, and it needs GitHub. There is no flat price. Reviews are billed on token usage through usage credits, on top of your plan. In the preview, reports put a review at about $15 to $25. It is not available for organizations with Zero Data Retention. And a review with no findings does not mean your code is safe. You still own what you merge. If you are on another plan, you can run `/code-review` inside Claude Code on your own branch instead.

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## Sources

- [Code Review is now generally available (Claude)](https://claude.com/resources/articles/code-review-is-now-generally-available)
- [Code Review docs (Claude Code)](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/code-review)
- [Customize Code Review with REVIEW.md](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/code-review-customize)
- [Code Review costs and usage](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/code-review-costs)
- [Anthropic makes Code Review generally available (The Next Web)](https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-code-review-ga-eu-residency)
- [Claude Code Review (InfoQ)](https://infoq.com/news/2026/04/claude-code-review)