TechieRedditer introduces a home-built AI assistant for Azure DevOps, offering automated PR reviews, instant work item queries, and honest insights into its capabilities and limitations.

Building an AI Extension to Enhance Azure DevOps Pull Request Reviews

Author: TechieRedditer

After struggling with long PR review cycles, I decided to build an AI-powered assistant that plugs directly into Azure DevOps to ease the pain of code review, work item tracking, and developer workflow.

Features

  • AI-powered PR Reviews: Delivers inline, GitHub-style review comments and code suggestions directly within your PRs.
  • Natural Language Queries: Use phrases like “What bugs are assigned to me?” to quickly retrieve work items, saving time over manual dashboard navigation.
  • Automatic Work Item Creation: Automatically generates new work items from review findings, tying actionable issues back to code discussions.
  • Bring Your Own LLM: The extension works with your own OpenAI or Azure AI API key (BYOLLM approach), ensuring privacy and flexibility.

Real-world Results

  • Review time lowered by approximately 60%
  • Consistently identifies security issues missed by manual reviews
  • Work item queries complete in seconds, reducing friction and boosting productivity

Availability

Integration Scenarios and Limitations

  • Azure DevOps + Jira: Currently supports only native Azure DevOps work item integration. Jira support is not available yet, but granular feature controls (enabling/disabling chat, PR review, or work item automation) are in the roadmap.
  • Complex Codebases: For large monorepos (e.g., 500k+ lines, embedded/Eclipse projects, HAL target architectures), the extension reviews PRs in isolation due to language model context window limits. It won’t perform deep, cross-project architectural analysis or recommend complex code reorganizations but will surface basic issues, security risks, and code smells.

Manual Evaluation

You can manually test the extension on representative PRs alongside your current workflows. The extension operates read-only and provides a dedicated UI, ensuring a risk-free, side-by-side comparison with your regular review process.

Key Takeaways

  • AI-powered reviews can significantly accelerate PR turnaround while maintaining code quality.
  • Integration leverages modern language models (OpenAI/Azure AI) without storing your code externally.
  • Feature flexibility and real-world constraints are openly discussed, with clear communication on what the tool can and cannot do in large, complex codebases.

For support, discussions, or to provide feedback, reach out at support@aidevex.com.

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