I manage two engineering teams, 12 engineers in total. Over the past few months, complaints about PR reviews have been coming up more and more. Too many PRs, reviews taking too long, and people getting blocked waiting for someone to take a look.
It's become one of our biggest bottlenecks to shipping.
We also recently had a regression where an improvement to one of our core features ended up breaking three other important functionalities. We spent the next two weeks fixing regressions.
That got me thinking quite a bit about how we review code. We need to review faster, but clearly we can't afford to be less thorough either.
I've been building an open source tool called Alden to try to help with this, and I've used Claude Code quite extensively to build it.
Claude helped me design the UI, built most of the website, wrote the documentation and helped implement the deterministic pipeline that runs the checks. I also used it for QA, which was probably one of the more interesting parts of the process. I had Claude draft test cases from my acceptance criteria, then open a browser and test the same scenarios I was testing manually, in parallel. Basically a second pair of hands doing QA alongside me.
I recently added a Claude Code plugin so I could use Alden directly in the same environment I'd been building it with.
The idea is fairly simple. Rather than having Claude review a diff and dump a bunch of comments, Alden gives it more context about the change and helps you figure out where to spend your attention.
For example:
/alden:queue shows the PRs waiting for your review and ranks them.
/alden:review 2 prepares a brief on the second PR in your queue, including potential issues and callers of changed functions outside the diff. Claude can then investigate further.
/alden:remember "Money is in cents, never floats" saves context that gets included in future reviews of that repo.
You can also ask Claude to review a specific PR or tell you what's waiting on you.
One design decision I made was to keep submitting reviews separate from the agent. Claude can draft comments in Alden, but the plugin doesn't give it a tool to publish them. You review and submit them yourself.
To be clear, this isn't a security boundary. Claude Code may have access to other tools or credentials that could let it interact with GitHub. I'm just deliberately not making publishing part of the plugin's workflow.
There's also a feedback loop where you can tell Alden which findings were useful so it can adjust what it prioritises over time.
The plugin uses Claude Code's existing model, so you don't need a separate model API key for it.
It's open source and free.
GitHub: https://github.com/getalden/claude-plugin
Docs: https://getalden.dev/docs/claude-code
I'm curious how others are dealing with this. Have PR reviews become a bottleneck for your teams too? And has AI actually helped you review faster without compromising quality?