Add Extra Code Context

Code Context helps Aikido understand your team’s unique coding practices and exceptions. By providing context about your codebase, you can fine-tune how Code Quality analyzes your pull requests, reducing noise and making reviews more relevant to your team’s standards.

What is Code Context?

Code Context allows you to teach Aikido about your team’s specific coding conventions, architectural decisions, and acceptable exceptions to general best practices. This ensures Code Quality comments are relevant and actionable rather than generic.

Think of Code Context as a way to document your team’s “tribal knowledge” - those unwritten rules and exceptions that every team member knows but aren’t captured in traditional linting rules.

Common Code Context examples

Performance and architecture decisions

Our data-export-service repository is our nightly batch processor for archived data. We intentionally avoid database indexes here because the tables are append-only and indexes would slow down our bulk insert operations.

Tool-specific exceptions

Debug logging and console.log statements are acceptable in our troubleshooting-utils repository as these are CLI tools designed for debugging production issues.

Relaxed standards for internal tools

For data migration scripts in the migrations/ folder, we exceed line count limits multiple times. This is acceptable as these are one-time scripts. We also don't enforce strict error handling in internal-facing scripts because our team knows how to use them.

Import conventions

Wildcard imports (import * as) are acceptable when importing from our @company/ui-components library as we intentionally export all components as a single namespace.

Documentation requirements

Relaxed JSDoc requirements apply to internal helper functions in the utils/ folder. Full documentation is only required for exported public APIs.

Performance optimizations

Performance-critical functions in our real-time-processing module can skip certain TypeScript strict checks when properly commented with @performance-critical.

How to Add Extra Code Context

Step 1. Go to Code Quality Checks page and click Code Context

Step 2. Click Add Code Context to add new code context.

Step 3. Define the Code Context

• Write a clear description explaining your team’s practice or exception

• Choose the scope:

  • All repositories - Applies to your entire organization

  • Selected repositories - Only applies to specific repos

Tips on Writing Effective Context

Do:

• Be specific about when and why exceptions apply

• Reference specific folders, file patterns, or repositories

• Explain the reasoning behind architectural decisions

• Use clear, concise language

Don’t:

• Create overly broad exceptions that defeat the purpose of quality checks

• Duplicate what’s already handled by toggling checks on/off

• Write vague statements without clear scope

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Code Context vs Custom Code Rules

Here some small guidelines to understand when to use which functionality

Use Code Context when:

• You have acceptable exceptions to best practices in certain areas

• You need to adjust existing rules for specific situations

• You want to provide explanations for architectural decisions

Use Custom Code Rules when:

• You need to enforce new standards not covered by default checks

• You want to detect specific patterns unique to your codebase

• You need hard enforcement with consistent detection

• You want to block PRs for specific violations