Writing code got cheap. Reviewing it didn't. With Claude Code humming along, my team ships pull requests faster than ever — and every one of them lands on me to check. A pull request, or PR, is the proposal a developer submits before their code gets merged into the main project; someone has to read it and approve it. That someone was me, every morning, across half a dozen repositories. The coding got automated. The bottleneck just moved to my eyeballs.
This post covers a small tool I built to hand off the boring first pass of that review, what it costs, and why I'd rather pay a machine to do it.
What the tool does
It watches the repositories I care about and, whenever a new PR shows up, fires it off to DeepSeek V4 Pro — a low-cost AI model — for a first-pass review. DeepSeek reads the diff, runs a few different review angles over it (correctness, security, maintainability, test coverage), and reports back whether it found anything worth a human's attention.
Most PRs come back clean. The ones that don't get flagged, fixed, and only then land in front of me. By the time I look, the obvious stuff is already sorted. I review the genuinely interesting changes instead of rubber-stamping submodule bumps at 9am.
Why this is worth it
Two reasons: money and attention.
The money part is almost a joke. Each PR review runs a few cents — most under ten — and a full day of watching every repo comes in around a dollar, well under the cap I set.
The attention part matters more. Code review is the kind of task that never ends — there's always another PR in the queue — and reading diffs all day is genuinely draining. Offloading the first pass means I spend my brain on business logic, architecture, and how the pieces fit together, instead of on the hundredth "did they remember the null check" of the week.
Running it yourself
It's a command-line tool — meaning you run it in a terminal, the text window where you type commands instead of clicking buttons — and it lives entirely on your own machine. It polls your repos, sends new PRs to DeepSeek, and prints a live dashboard of what's open, what's been reviewed, and what each review cost.
The code is on GitHub if you want to point it at your own repositories.
Verdict
Coding is cheap now. Human attention isn't. Spending a dollar a day to keep my mornings clear of routine review is the easiest trade I've made all year — the value isn't the dollar I save, it's the hour I get back.
Next up: what DeepSeek catches that I'd have missed, and what it misses that I catch.