AI code reviews stopped quietly
GitHub Actions job timeout no review requested backlog1What happened
every change to our code waits for an automatic AI review before it can merge. A small background job asks for that review whenever one is missing.
On a Friday morning the job started reading every open change (262 of them) before asking for a single review. It hit its 5-minute limit and stopped, every 10 minutes, with no error anyone saw.
The backup path failed the same day: its access key had stopped working, so GitHub answered "bad credentials".
The fix for the job itself needed a review to merge, so it waited in the same line.
Nobody told the owner, because no rule said a stopped merge line was urgent. We parked it for a planned session two days later. That was the miss.
By Sunday morning hundreds of changes sat unreviewed, across every project.
2What we did
The job now asks one change at a time, so it never needs to read the whole list before it acts.
It runs on GitHub's own machines, outside our busy server, under a new access key that is locked to our main code line.
GitHub sometimes skips or delays scheduled jobs when it is busy (one of ours ran 40 minutes late, another never ran). So on our main project the job now runs several times an hour, and our own server starts it once an hour as a backup. Each change still gets at most 4 asks, spaced further apart each time.
New rule: anything that stops merges, posts or sales reaches the owner within 1 hour, with the one thing needed from them, or a desk fixes it.
3How we checked
on the live projects, checked by people other than the builder.
The first ask after the fix got an AI review 16 seconds later.
One run on our largest project asked for 28 missing reviews in a row, and reviews came back.
A test fails if the job ever tries any write other than the review request.
4Try it
a job that reads everything first, then acts, fails all at once when the list grows, and it fails quietly. Act on each item as you read it. And decide in advance which failures count as urgent, before one sits for two days.
