Skip to main content
A review directive lets you tell Kody where to focus its deepest analysis for a single review. Instead of changing any configuration, you attach a short instruction when you trigger the review — for example, “focus on the auth and session logic” — and Kody spends its hardest analysis on the changed code that matches.
A directive is ephemeral: it applies to that one review run only. It is not saved to your settings and does not affect future reviews. To change Kody’s behavior permanently, use Custom Prompts or Kody Rules instead.

​
When to Use It

  • A PR touches many files but you care most about one risky area (auth, payments, a migration).
  • You want Kody to trace the callers and callees of a specific change and challenge it harder.
  • You’re re-running a review and want to steer attention without editing any config.

​
Priority, Not a Filter

This is the most important thing to understand:
A directive sets priority, not a filter. Kody prioritizes the focus area, but it still reports any concrete bug, security, or performance issue it notices elsewhere in the diff. It never suppresses findings outside the focus, and it never approves the rest of the PR unseen.
Use a directive to say “look here hardest” — not “only look here.”

​
How to Trigger It

Add your focus text right after the review command in a pull request comment:
You can also use start-review, and combine it with --force:
--force re-runs the review even when Kody would normally skip it (“no new commits since the last review”). Use it — with or without a focus directive — to get a fresh pass after fixing whatever made the previous run fail, or to apply updated settings to an already-reviewed PR.
Only the first line after the command is used as the directive. Everything on later lines is ignored, so keep your focus to a single line.
Works on GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, and Forgejo.

​
Heavy mode

Alpha — access by request. Heavy mode is not on by default for anyone. To try it, ask us to enable it for your organization on Discord or at support@kodus.io. Until then the flag is accepted but has no effect — see Availability below.
A focus directive tells Kody where to look hardest. --heavy tells it to look longer: the finder runs extra “what did you miss?” critic passes over the same diff, surfacing more real issues at the cost of a slower review and more candidates to triage.
--heavy can sit anywhere on the command line — before or after your focus text — and it is stripped from the directive either way, so @kody review focus on the retry logic --heavy focuses on “the retry logic”.
To combine it with --force, put --force first. --force is only recognized immediately after the command word, so @kody review --force --heavy runs a forced heavy review, while @kody review --heavy --force runs a heavy review that is not forced.
A dash is required: a bare heavy is read as directive text, so @kody review heavy checkout path focuses on “heavy checkout path” rather than enabling the flag.

​
Availability

Heavy mode is an alpha feature. It only runs for organizations we’ve explicitly opted in:
The flag fails open, not loud. If your organization isn’t opted in, --heavy is accepted and the review runs normally — no error, no warning, no different result. If you asked for access and can’t tell whether it’s active, ping us rather than assuming it ran.
To request access, message us on Discord or email support@kodus.io with your organization name.
Reach for it on the changes where missing something is expensive — a migration, an auth change, a payment path — not as a default. On everyday PRs the extra candidates are usually noise you have to filter.

​
Writing a Good Directive

  • Be specific about the area, not the verdict. “focus on concurrency in the queue consumer” works better than “find bugs”.
  • Name the code, not the outcome. Point at a module, flow, or concern (“the retry logic”, “the SQL in the reports service”).
  • Keep it short. Directives are capped at 500 characters; only the first line of a comment is read.
  • @kody review focus on the authentication and token-refresh flow
  • @kody review focus on the new Stripe webhook handling
  • kodus review --focus "race conditions in the background worker"
  • @kody review please be thorough — no area to prioritize.
  • @kody review only comment on file X — a directive is not a filter; use ignore paths to scope files instead.

​
Notes & Limits

  • Length: directives are truncated at 500 characters.
  • First line only: for PR comments, only the first line after the command becomes the directive.
  • Untrusted by design: because anyone who can comment on the PR can supply a directive, the text is sanitized before use (control characters and angle brackets are stripped). This does not change your focus — it only prevents the text from tampering with Kody’s internal prompt.
  • Not persisted: nothing is written to your repository or organization settings.