GitHub has introduced a dedicated personal settings page for Copilot code review and an enterprise‑wide default review‑effort option, now visible on every Copilot subscription tier. Engineers can now decide exactly when automated reviews fire and at what effort level, which directly influences CI workload, review turnaround, and governance across projects.
New personal configuration surface
Under profile → Copilot settings a code review tab appears for all plans, including Business and Enterprise. From this page you can enable automatic reviews that trigger on pull‑request creation, co‑authoring, or when a draft is marked ready. Separate toggles let you add automatic reviews for new pushes and for draft pull requests you author or co‑author. A default review effort—currently offered as Lite or Balanced—is applied to every automatic or manually requested review unless you explicitly choose a different effort at request time.
Enterprise‑level default effort
Enterprise administrators now have a single setting to define the default review effort for the entire organization. The choice can be Lite, Balanced, or the platform’s built‑in default. This setting propagates to all organization‑owned repositories through inheritance, but individual organizations or repositories retain the ability to override the default with their own effort choice.
Operational considerations
Enabling automatic reviews on pushes and drafts can increase the number of review runs, potentially adding load to CI resources that execute Copilot’s analysis. Teams should monitor the frequency of automatic triggers and compare the impact of Lite versus Balanced effort on review latency and suggestion quality. The hierarchy of defaults—enterprise, organization, repository, and personal—means that audit trails may be needed to understand which setting is in effect for a given pull request. Overriding defaults at lower levels should be documented to avoid unexpected variations in review behavior across teams.
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What This Means For Practitioners
- Review your current CI capacity before enabling automatic reviews on pushes or drafts.
- Choose a default effort that balances speed (Lite) against depth (Balanced) based on your codebase’s risk profile.
- Document any organization or repository overrides to keep review expectations consistent.
- Periodically assess the quality of Copilot suggestions under each effort level to ensure they meet your quality gates.
