🎙️ How I AI: Build an AI code review bot in 30 minutes + Claude Code for normal people

Claire: A useful internal agent can now be built and deployed in a single Codex session, starting with a prompt that's only a couple of sentences long. In this case, the initial ask was essentially: build a GitHub bot that waits for checks to pass; grades each PR as low, medium, or high risk; and automatically approves the low-risk ones. Everything after that was steering and refinement, not a giant up-front specification.

Claire: Browser use removes much of the configuration tax that makes agent setup feel harder than it should. Creating a Slack bot and GitHub app manually normally means clicking through endless permission screens, choosing scopes, and managing tokens. Codex handled almost all of that through the browser. The human's job was mostly to click "save" and complete 2FA. What usually takes hours took minutes.

Claire: The operational design matters just as much as the underlying technology. Merge Mommy doesn't actually merge anything. Instead, it posts a gray check in GitHub as a signal, then sends a Slack message with the risk score and a note saying the PR is ready to approve and merge. That small handoff preserves human accountability for the final action while eliminating most of the cognitive work involved in reviewing a routine change.

Claire: The key is having a clear way to separate changes that can skip human review from ones that can't. The risk model used here scores each PR across six dimensions: the size of the change, its blast radius, how easily it can be reversed, its data and security implications, its operational impact, and whether tests and CI have actually been completed. Anything below 24 points is classified as low risk and cleared by the agent; anything above 64 goes straight to a human for review. The exact numbers matter less than turning a vague judgment call into a repeatable system.

Claire: Vercel's Eve may be the fastest way to deploy a serious internal AI agent across Slack and GitHub without spending weeks building infrastructure. It handles the annoying plumbing—connectors, refresh tokens, sandboxing, and routing across channels—so the actual work becomes writing instructions and skills in Markdown instead of babysitting OAuth flows.