Reviewer

The Reviewer responsibility is to apply judgment that should not be delegated to the automated pipeline: product intent, architecture, operational risk, security context, and organization-specific policy.

This is not a Colony permission or a mandatory gate. Human review occurs when merge policy requires it, when the workflow surfaces work for attention, or when a person chooses to inspect and steer a PR.

What the automated reviewer does

For a pipeline PR, the Review executor can run commands configured under review.checks and then perform an LLM review. If no deterministic commands are configured, Colony does not automatically supply a standard lint, test, type-check, or security suite.

The LLM result contains a verdict, summary, review comments, and action items. Colony uses it to approve the PR, request changes, or surface a failure. It does not produce a documented “confidence flags” contract, and its output should be evaluated like any other automated review signal.

Depending on the result, human attention may arrive before all checks pass. Do not assume that reaching a human-facing state proves every deterministic or provider check succeeded; inspect the PR checks and Colony’s recorded result.

What to review

Apply the same standard you would to a human-authored change:

• Does the change satisfy the issue’s intent, not merely its literal wording?
• Does it fit the repository’s architecture and conventions?
• Are security, privacy, performance, migration, and operational effects acceptable?
• Are the tests appropriate for the risk and behavior changed?
• Is the diff scoped well enough to understand and maintain?

.colony/conventions.md gives the agents repository guidance, but it is not a substitute for policy, branch protection, or human domain knowledge.

Steer explicitly

An ordinary PR comment is useful context, but it does not universally transition the pipeline or guarantee a new Develop task. Use the command whose semantics match the desired action and whose state constraints allow it:

Intent	Typical control
Send concrete feedback back to implementation	/colony:feedback
Run automated review again	/colony:review
Abandon the current approach and develop again	/colony:reimplement
Retry a failed task for the current state	/colony:retry

Command availability depends on the issue’s pinned workflow. See Slash Commands rather than relying on a copied list.

Control merging at the right level

review.auto_merge_on_approval controls whether approved pipeline PRs enter Colony’s automatic merge path. When it is false, approved work stops for a human merge. When true, code-host permissions, required checks, protection rules, and conflicts still apply.

Colony does not implement a built-in per-PR do-not-automerge label or PR-body marker. If a class of changes requires a human approval or coordinated merge, enforce that with repository merge policy and branch protection, or disable automatic merge for the repository.

Going deeper

• The Workflow — automated review outcomes
• External PR Review — Colony reviews for eligible human-authored PRs
• Slash Commands — exact syntax and valid states