My tiny workflow for an AI code review assist

I wanted to share a small workflow I find helpful that I haven't necessarily seen mentioned elsewhere. I don't always want AI assistance for a code review but it can sometimes be helpful and for those cases I use the below method.

1. Download the raw PR diff file. In GitHub you can do this very easily by adding '.diff' to the end of the pull request url and then saving the resulting page.

2. Go to your preferred AI chat/ide that accepts file attachments and has access to your codebase, I like Cursor for this.

3. Git checkout the feature branch if you aren't on it already.

4. In the AI chat attach the diff file and a message like "help me review this pr, diff attached, we are on the feature branch"

That's it. Sometimes I make the chat message more relevant, tell it some background about the task, and ask it for specific parts of the pull I am interested in checking, but nine times out of ten I just use the very simple message as above and it works fine.

It certainly spouts out some garbage, but it has also caught some very obvious and non-obvious bugs.

What I like about this method as opposed to say bugbot, apart from the fact that bugbot costs extra, is it makes it easy to continue the conversation and also to look through the files/diffs in the ide.

Hope this workflow is helpful to someone.