Quick start

Code review is one setting. Turn it on and every pull request in your organization is reviewed by the built-in pipeline: findings land as inline comments on the pull request, and each push is reviewed incrementally, so already-reviewed lines are never commented twice. You need the Ellipsis GitHub App installed; nothing else.

Enable reviews

1. Open the Reviews page in the dashboard and select the Settings tab.
2. Turn on Review pull requests. In an organization, only admins can change it.

That is the whole setup. The switch is org-wide and off by default, and no configuration file is needed: the toggle alone reviews every pull request in the organization. Scoping to specific repositories, branches, or authors is a separate, optional code_review.yaml, committed to the root of your .ellipsis repository to govern the organization, or to the root of one repository to govern that repository; see Which PRs get reviewed.

Your first review

1. Push a commit to any open pull request, or open a new one. When priya-shah opens "Reject overlapping shift trades" in splitshift-api, that alone triggers the review. Bot pull requests are reviewed too, apart from dependabot[bot] and renovate[bot]: a dependency bump is exactly the change nobody reads closely, but reviewing every batch those two open would dominate your spend. Narrowing or widening the audience is a deliberate choice either way.
2. Watch the pull request. An eyes reaction appears while the review runs. When it finishes, one review posts with inline comments, anchored to the commit it reviewed. A review that finds nothing posts a one-line summary instead of invented nitpicks.
3. Open the Reviews page in the dashboard. The review is listed with its findings, cost, and the commits it covered.

The first review of a pull request covers everything on it. Every review after that covers only the commits since the last review, never the whole pull request again; see new commits only.

Tune it

Everything past the toggle lives in one optional pipeline file. The configuration YAML reference covers the whole file: reviewers, filters, budgets, and the optional gatekeeper stage. Which PRs get reviewed covers where to commit that file for the scope you want, then scoping by repository, branch, path, author, and draft status. Reviewers covers writing your own reviewers, with their prompts and models, in place of the built-in one.