How Deep Review Works

Deep Review is Aikido's agentic pull request reviewer. Instead of treating the diff as the full story, Aikido explores relevant code, reasons about the wider impact of a change, and posts feedback directly on your pull request.

It covers both security and quality. It can flag a missing access check, and a refactor that breaks pagination on large result sets, as long as the issue shows up in the impact of this pull request.

Deep Review vs other PR checks

Pull requests can already receive comments from more than one Aikido check. They answer different questions:

Check	What it looks at	Cadence
SAST in PR gating	Known security patterns on the diff	On new code, once enabled
Code Quality	Quality rules on the changed lines	On new code, once enabled
Deep Review	Security and quality impact of the change, with context beyond the diff	Credits per PR

Deep Review does not replace SAST or Code Quality. Enable those in PR Checks and keep them on for every commit. Use Deep Review when you want to find complex issues that need more context than the diff.

For the full map, see Which Aikido product should I use?.

Context beyond the diff

A diff shows what changed, but not always how that change interacts with the rest of your application. Deep Review pulls in relevant context from outside the changed lines before deciding whether to comment, so it can review changes that depend on existing behavior elsewhere in the codebase.

Cross-repository context

If your application spans multiple repositories, you can link related repositories to the repository under review. Deep Review can then use those repositories as additional context when reasoning about shared libraries, APIs, and services.

The number of repositories you can link depends on your Aikido plan.

Feedback in your pull request

Aikido posts comments directly on your pull request when Deep Review has feedback to share. You don't need to leave your existing review workflow to see or discuss the results.

Deep Review also posts its own status check (Aikido Security: Deep Review). Whether that check fails follows the same gating settings as the security review: the failure threshold, Always Pass, and Always make the PR check green.

When you fix an issue that a comment identifies, Aikido automatically resolves the comment. Learn how Aikido manages comments after an issue is fixed.

Reply in natural language

Reply to any Deep Review comment in plain language. You don't need to tag Aikido or use a special command format, and you can stay in the pull request without switching to the Aikido UI.

What you say	Example	Status
Ignore a finding	"This is a false positive, please ignore."	Available now. Aikido ignores the finding.
Share context or push back	"This is intentional because we validate on the server."	Available now. Aikido uses the feedback to improve future reviews. Shared memory across reviews is coming soon.
Ask for clarification	"Can you explain why this is a problem?"	Coming soon
Request a follow-up	"Suggest a safer alternative."	Coming soon

Credits

Deep Review costs 1 credit per pull request. Additional reviews on the same PR (for example after new commits) don't cost extra. When you're out of credits, Deep Reviews are skipped.

You can also set a monthly spending limit for Deep Review from Wallet settings. When the limit is reached, Deep Reviews that would charge a credit are skipped until the next calendar month.

Curious what Deep Review would cost for your team? Our estimator gives you an idea based on your activity of the last 30 days.

Learn how to configure Deep Review.