What is ADO Pilot?

ADO Pilot reviews every pull request in your Azure DevOps organization with an AI reviewer and posts findings as inline PR comments and a status check. You sign up at adopilot.dev, connect your Azure DevOps organization with a personal access token, and reviews start running automatically the next time a PR is created or updated. No pipeline changes, no build agent install, no source-tree ingestion, and no Marketplace extension required.

What ADO Pilot reviews

ADO Pilot looks at the diff of each pull request — the lines added and removed — and produces findings across these categories:

• Security issues
• Bugs and correctness defects
• Performance problems
• Error handling gaps
• Maintainability concerns
• Testing gaps

Every review runs as a two-pass pipeline: an initial broad pass surfaces candidate findings, then a self-critique pass rescinds findings that don't hold up. Only the survivors of the second pass become PR comments. This is by design — see Why the review is two passes.

What ADO Pilot won't review

• Binary files, lock files, generated code, and minified bundles (excluded by default)
• Files matching your organization's, project's, or repository's exclusion patterns
• Diffs over the size cap (a partial review is posted with a truncation notice)
• Closed or completed pull requests
• Branches outside your configured branch filters

For details on size limits and partial-review behavior, see What ADO Pilot won't review.

Where comments appear

Every review writes to two places on your pull request:

• Inline comments threaded to specific file and line ranges. Each comment carries a severity, a category tag, and — where applicable — a one-click suggestion code fence.
• A PR-level summary comment that updates in place as the review progresses (queued, in progress, complete) and ends with a verdict: PASS, ADVISORY, or FAIL.

ADO Pilot also posts a status check named ai-pr-review (genre adopilot). You can require the check as a branch policy in Azure DevOps to gate merges on AI review. See Setting AI review as a required PR check.

The BYOL model

ADO Pilot is sold on the Azure DevOps Marketplace as a BYOL (bring-your-own-license) extension. You pay ADO Pilot directly for review usage; the Marketplace doesn't bill you for the extension itself. Billing is usage-based, not seat-based — you pay per review credit (RC) consumed, not per developer in your org. See Pricing overview for the plan structure.

Your code stays in Azure DevOps. ADO Pilot reads the PR diff and filenames over the Azure DevOps REST API, sends them to the AI reviewer, and writes the resulting comments back. The full source tree is never copied or indexed. For the formal data-flow description, see Data handling.

What you need to get started

To run your first review, you need:

• An Azure DevOps Services organization (cloud-hosted; on-premises Azure DevOps Server is not supported in v1)
• A way to authenticate ADO Pilot to your org — a personal access token (PAT) is the v1 default; delegated OAuth and service-principal flows are roadmap items
• An open pull request to point the wizard at

That's the full list. You do not need to install the Marketplace extension to run reviews — the wizard provisions service-hook subscriptions directly and reviews fire from those. The optional extension adds a Run AI Review button and a read-only project-admin hub inside Azure DevOps; see Installing the extension for when that's worth installing.

The Quickstart walks you through signup to first review in about ten minutes. Start the wizard at adopilot.dev.