Review Strictness & Customization

Blame gives engineering teams granular control over automated code reviews. Whether your team wants high-level architectural sanity checks or exhaustive line-by-line verification, you can calibrate strictness, comment styling, section visibility, and review triggers. To access these settings:

Open the Blame dashboard and navigate to Settings.
Under the Code Review section in the left sidebar, select Strictness.

1. Review Strictness Levels

The strictness level determines how aggressively Blame evaluates pull request diffs and what category of findings it surfaces.

Strictness Level	Focus & Trigger Threshold	When to Use
`Low`	Flags strictly critical runtime failures, security vulnerabilities, broken imports, and unhandled fatal exceptions.	High-velocity teams who only want blockers flagged without styling or non-critical suggestions.
`Medium` (Default)	Flags critical issues plus defensive boundary conditions, missing schema validation, unhandled async errors, and architectural consistency.	Standard production codebases balancing thorough review with developer velocity.
`High`	Exhaustive scrutiny covering all the above plus missing unit/integration tests, performance overhead, coupling trade-offs, and idiomatic optimizations.	Mission-critical systems, core infrastructure, and compliance-heavy environments.

2. Modular PR Summary Sections

Blame allows you to customize the layout of the top-level PR summary comment. Each section can be independently Enabled/Disabled, set as Collapsible (<details>), and configured to be Default Open or Default Closed.

Section Key	Section Name	Description	Default State
`pr_summary`	Blame Summary	Executive overview, architectural design review, edge-case audit, and security analysis.	Enabled (Visible)
`confidence_score`	Confidence Score	Calibrated rating (`1/5` to `5/5`) with technical justification and merge recommendation.	Enabled (Visible)
`issue_table`	Important Files Changed	Scannable breakdown of changes and observations per modified file.	Enabled (Collapsible)
`sequence_diagram`	Sequence Diagram	Auto-generated Mermaid sequence diagram visualizing complex cross-service or async flows.	Enabled (Collapsible)
`comments_outside_diff`	Findings Outside Diff	Surfaces issues discovered in upstream or surrounding files outside active diff hunks.	Enabled (Collapsible)

Summary Customization Options

Update PR Description: Option to append or sync the executive review summary directly into GitHub’s initial PR description box.
Image & Confidence Badges: Toggle rendered visual status badges for confidence scores in PR comments.

3. Custom Review Comment Header

You can configure a custom header (up to 120 characters) prepended to the top of all review summaries and inline comments.

Examples

🤖 Blame Engineering Gate
🛡️ Security & Architecture Review
⚡ Acme Corp Automated CI Review

4. Custom Natural Language Review Instructions

You can provide workspace-level or repository-specific instructions (up to 4,000 characters) to enforce team-specific conventions and guidelines.

Example Instruction Guidelines

- We use Zod for all API input validation. Flag any request body that lacks schema parsing.

- Never allow raw SQL strings; all database queries must use our query builder helper (`db.query`).

- Ensure all asynchronous handlers in `app/api/**` return appropriate HTTP status envelopes `{ success: boolean, data?: any, error?: string }`.

- Verify that every new service function includes corresponding unit test files under `tests/unit/`.

In addition to custom instructions in the dashboard, Blame automatically discovers and respects .cursorrules, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and blame.yaml in your repository.

5. Review Trigger Controls

Control when and how Blame evaluates code changes.

Auto-Review New Commits (`auto_review_new_commits`)

Enabled (Default): Automatically re-evaluates the PR and updates the summary whenever a developer pushes new commits (synchronize webhook event).
Disabled: Reviews run only on initial PR creation or when manually triggered via slash commands.

Review Draft Pull Requests (`review_draft_prs`)

Disabled (Default): Ignores draft PRs until they are converted to “Ready for review”.
Enabled: Instantly analyzes draft PRs to provide early feedback during development.

Review Architecture & Anatomy — Complete anatomy of review summaries and inline comments.
CI/CD Quality Gates & Status Checks — Enforcing confidence thresholds in branch protection rules.
Auto-Approve Low-Risk Pull Requests — Automating low-risk PR merges.

Getting Started

Code Review

Account

How Blame Works

Review Strictness & Customization

1. Review Strictness Levels

2. Modular PR Summary Sections

Summary Customization Options

3. Custom Review Comment Header

Examples

4. Custom Natural Language Review Instructions

Example Instruction Guidelines

5. Review Trigger Controls

Auto-Review New Commits (`auto_review_new_commits`)

Review Draft Pull Requests (`review_draft_prs`)

​1. Review Strictness Levels

​2. Modular PR Summary Sections

​Summary Customization Options

​3. Custom Review Comment Header

​Examples

​4. Custom Natural Language Review Instructions

​Example Instruction Guidelines

​5. Review Trigger Controls

​Auto-Review New Commits (auto_review_new_commits)

​Review Draft Pull Requests (review_draft_prs)

​Related Documentation

1. Review Strictness Levels

2. Modular PR Summary Sections

Summary Customization Options

3. Custom Review Comment Header

Examples

4. Custom Natural Language Review Instructions

Example Instruction Guidelines

5. Review Trigger Controls

Auto-Review New Commits (`auto_review_new_commits`)

Review Draft Pull Requests (`review_draft_prs`)

Related Documentation