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UNIT 05 · LLM code review

trusty-review

A reviewer that reads the rest of the repository before it reads your diff, and says so plainly when it cannot.

Package
trusty-review
Default port
7880
Providers
AWS Bedrock, OpenRouter
MCP tools
review_pr, review_diff, review_health

Context first, opinion second

A model handed a bare diff will find style nits and miss the thing that matters, because the caller it breaks is in a file it never saw. trusty-review fixes the input rather than the prompt: it retrieves code context from trusty-search and complexity data from trusty-analyze before the reviewer model is called at all.

That is also why it will refuse. A review produced without that context is worse than no review — it reads exactly like a real one. When a required dependency is unreachable, a hosted review is skipped and the caller is told the reason, in a shape distinct from any verdict so it cannot be mistaken for one.

Point it at anything

  • A GitHub pull request: trusty-review run owner repo 123.
  • A ref range, with no manual diff step: trusty-review run --base origin/main.
  • A patch on stdin: git diff origin/main...HEAD | trusty-review run --local-diff -.
  • A checkout the search daemon has never seen, via --source-root.

Only a GitHub PR review can post a comment, and only once you turn dry-run off. Every other source is dry-run by construction — a local diff cannot reach your repository's review thread however it is invoked.

trusty-review compare runs the same diff past several models at once, which is the honest way to decide whether a cheaper reviewer is good enough for your codebase.

A verdict, not a wall of prose

Every review returns a letter grade, a verdict — APPROVE, APPROVE with reservations, REQUEST_CHANGES, BLOCK, or UNKNOWN when the diff was too truncated to judge — and findings carrying their own severity and confidence. The verdict is derived from the grade, then clamped so it can never come out weaker than the findings' own severity floor already requires. Token counts and an estimated cost ride along in the footer.

UNKNOWN exists deliberately. A reviewer that cannot see enough to form an opinion should say so, not approve.

Standards that live in the repo

Drop a .trusty-review.toml at your repository root and every contributor and CI run picks up the same review standards with no per-machine setup — a voice package, and optionally a named template that appends extra scrutiny on top of the stock rubric. Template names are validated as bare identifiers precisely because that file is attacker-controlled: any PR author can add one.

A template only appends. It never replaces the grade scale, the verdict table, or the severity anchors, so a project cannot quietly redefine what BLOCK means.

Due-diligence reports

trusty-review report --manifest <file> generates a structured technical due-diligence report across one or more repositories: executive summary, per-application scorecards, findings by severity, and graph-ready data appendices in Markdown and JSON.

The default run is fully deterministic — measured from the checkouts themselves, no model involved. --synthesize layers LLM prose over the summary and the non-healthy findings only, and fails closed to the deterministic output rather than emit a partially-trusted result. Every value carries a marker saying whether it was measured, declared, or inferred, and a figure that appears nowhere in the underlying data is rejected before it can reach the page.

Install

tctl resolves whatever else this crate needs at runtime and keeps macOS signing grants stable across upgrades. The other install paths — Homebrew, or cargo install from source — are on the home page.

curl -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bobmatnyc/trusty-tools/main/install.sh | sh
tctl install trusty-review

Build and test this crate from a checkout with cargo test -p trusty-review.

Read the source

trusty-review publishes no documentation page yet — the crate's own README and source are the reference.

View on GitHub

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trusty-tools

One Cargo workspace for the trusty-* tooling ecosystem. MIT licensed.

© 2026 · MIT · github.com/bobmatnyc/trusty-tools