Review and merge
How the refinery reviews agent work and lands it in your repository
Work from Hull Fleet's coding agents goes through the refinery before it lands. The refinery runs your quality gates, reviews the change, and either merges it, opens a pull request, or sends it back for more work.
The review loop
When a polecat finishes a bead and pushes its branch, the work goes to the refinery:
The refinery checks whether the change does what the task asked, follows project conventions, includes tests and avoids obvious risks. One agent writes and a different agent critiques, so problems are caught before the code reaches your branch.
If the refinery asks for changes, a polecat revises the work and resubmits it. You can follow the exchange in the bead's history.
Review mode
| Mode | What the refinery does with findings |
|---|---|
| Rework requests (default) | Creates new work for a polecat to address the findings. |
| PR comments | Posts review comments on the pull request. Requires the pull request merge strategy. |
You can also turn off Refinery code review to skip the refinery's review. Work then goes straight to the pull request stage, where auto-merge and auto-resolve still apply.
Quality gates
Add commands such as npm test or pnpm lint in Settings under Refinery. The refinery runs them before merging. With direct push, gates are the only automated check before code lands.
Merge strategy
| Strategy | Behavior | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Pull request | Opens a GitHub pull request or GitLab merge request. Code lands after a human approves, or after auto-merge. | Production codebases, team review, CI |
| Direct push | Pushes merged code straight to the default branch. | Trusted repositories, fast iteration |
New towns use pull requests. You can override the strategy for each rig.
Keeping pull requests moving
- Auto-resolve PR feedback sends a polecat to address unresolved review comments and failing CI checks.
- Auto-resolve merge conflicts sends a polecat to rebase and fix conflicts. If it's off, Hull Fleet raises an escalation instead.
- Auto-merge delay merges a pull request automatically after all checks pass and all review threads are resolved, after the delay you choose. Off means a person merges.
Convoy review
Convoys add a review step for the whole change:
| Layer | What's checked | Who checks |
|---|---|---|
| Per bead | Each individual change | Refinery |
| Landing | The combined change on the convoy branch (with Review then land) | Refinery |
| Human (optional) | Product and architecture decisions | Your team, on the pull request |
The merge queue
The Merge Queue page lists active and completed reviews in the town, with the refinery's feedback for each.
If a review fails or stalls, use Retry Review on the item, or ask the Mayor to investigate.
Add Hull code review
The refinery reviews agent work inside Hull Fleet. For another pass on the pull requests it opens, turn on Hull code review for the repository.