The AI Code Review Policy Template for Engineering Teams

Most engineering teams that ship AI-assisted code have an informal process — “we review it like any other PR” — and no written policy. That gap matters the moment an auditor asks for your AI code review procedure, or the moment a hallucinated API import ships to production because no gate caught it.

This post is a working template. It covers four sections: the technical gate (automatable, deterministic), human review requirements, secrets and credentials handling, and the escalation path for contested findings. Copy each section, fill the brackets, and adapt to your context.

Note: This template is a starting point, not a compliance-approved document. It is not legal advice. Run any policy by your legal and compliance teams before treating it as authoritative.

Before adopting this template, read AI Code Review Policy for Copilot Teams — it walks through the technical reasoning behind the three-gate architecture and shows full GitHub Actions and pre-commit configuration. This post gives you the policy text itself.

Why AI Code Needs a Different Policy

BrassCoders was built because the failure modes of AI-generated code differ structurally from those of human-written code — and standard PR review norms weren’t designed to catch them.

Human reviewers lose calibration when every function looks syntactically plausible. AI assistants repeat their own error patterns consistently, so one bad pattern tends to appear across many files rather than once. Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey found that more than 76% of developers use or plan to use AI coding tools, but the same data showed that developer trust in AI output trails adoption. The informal review norm can’t keep pace.

A policy closes the calibration gap by naming the gates explicitly. It tells every developer what must pass before code merges, what requires a human decision rather than an automated one, and what gets recorded for the auditor. The goal is not to slow down AI-assisted development. The goal is to make the review standard consistent and auditable.

Section 1: The Technical Gate (Template)

BrassCoders covers the technical gate section of an AI code review policy — a deterministic scanner that runs before code merges, catches rule-based failure modes, and exits with a non-zero code on critical findings so CI can enforce it.

Copy this block and fill the brackets:

## Technical Gate

**Tool:** BrassCoders (pip install brasscoders, Apache 2.0 OSS core)
**Trigger:** Every pull request targeting [main / develop / your protected branch]
**Enforcement:** CI step fails on any CRITICAL finding; merge is blocked until resolved

### What the scan covers

BrassCoders runs 12 scanners on each PR: Bandit (Python security), Pylint
(code quality), Pyre/Pysa (taint analysis), Semgrep, ast-grep, detect-secrets
(Yelp, entropy-based), plus six custom detectors covering secrets patterns,
privacy/PII, AI-generated code anti-patterns, performance, content moderation,
and JavaScript/TypeScript.

### Severity handling

| Severity | Action |
|---|---|
| CRITICAL | Blocks merge. Must be resolved or escalated before the PR can land. |
| HIGH | Logged to .brass/ and surfaced in PR comments. Reviewer must acknowledge. |
| MEDIUM | Logged. Developer reviews at discretion. |
| LOW / INFO | Available in detailed_analysis.yaml; no required action. |

### Audit artifact

Each CI run writes .brass/detailed_analysis.yaml: every finding with its file
path, line number, severity, scanner source, and evidence string. The artifact
uploads to [your CI system] with a 90-day retention period. The combination of
commit hash + BrassCoders version makes each run reproducible.

### Override procedure

A CI gate override requires:
1. An explicit comment in the PR description explaining why the finding is a false
   positive or why it cannot be resolved before merge.
2. Sign-off from [senior engineer / security lead] documented in the PR.
3. A follow-up ticket filed before merge, assigned to resolve the finding in the
   next sprint.

The scan covers the pattern-detectable failure classes. It does not cover logic errors, architectural decisions, or anything requiring business context. Those are the human review layer’s job.

Section 2: Human Review Requirements (Template)

BrassCoders covers the pattern-detectable failure classes. Human review covers everything else: intent errors, architectural trade-offs, and the business-context decisions that require a person. The policy should name exactly when human review is required rather than leaving it as “best practice.”

## Human Review Requirements

Human review is required (not advisory) for the following PR categories.
The automated scan passing does not satisfy this requirement.

### Mandatory senior engineer review

A senior engineer approval is required before merge for any PR that touches:

- Authentication, session handling, or authorization logic
- Payment, billing, or subscription code
- Data migrations or schema changes
- Cryptography, key management, or certificate handling
- User data exports or external data transfers
- [Add your organization's high-risk paths here]

"Senior engineer" means [define your org's threshold — e.g., Staff Engineer or
above, or any engineer with > 2 years tenure on the team].

### Standard peer review

One peer review is required for:

- API endpoint additions or changes (not covered by mandatory review above)
- New dependencies added to requirements.txt, package.json, or equivalent
- Changes to CI configuration or deployment scripts
- Changes to logging or monitoring configuration

### Review-only (no required approvals beyond the automated gate)

- Internal tooling with no user data exposure
- Documentation changes
- Test-only changes (no production code modified)
- Dependency version bumps that pass automated vulnerability scans

### Review checklist for AI-generated code

Reviewers evaluating AI-generated code should check for:

- [ ] Package imports exist and are correctly named (hallucinated imports pass
      linting, fail at runtime)
- [ ] No credentials, tokens, or keys hardcoded in example blocks
- [ ] Error handling is present and handles realistic failure cases
  (AI assistants often omit or stub error paths)
- [ ] Performance-sensitive loops are not O(N²) on realistic dataset sizes
- [ ] API calls use the library version actually installed (AI assistants
      sometimes call deprecated or future API signatures)

The checklist is intentionally short. A long checklist degrades to a checkbox-ticking exercise. Five specific checks that a reviewer can actually perform beat twenty aspirational ones.

Section 3: Secrets and Credentials (Template)

BrassCoders detects 20+ secret formats — AWS access keys, GitHub PATs, Stripe live keys, OpenAI keys, Slack tokens, PEM-formatted private keys, JWTs, and high-entropy strings — but a secrets policy needs more than detection. A secret committed to a repository spreads across every clone and every CI log that ever builds that commit. Rotation after-the-fact is expensive and sometimes impossible to verify completely.

## Secrets and Credentials Policy

### Pre-commit detection

All developers must have the BrassCoders pre-commit hook installed locally.
The hook runs brasscoders --offline scan before each commit and blocks on any
detected secret pattern.

Install:
  pip install brasscoders pre-commit
  pre-commit install

The BrassCoders secret scanner covers [20+ secret formats including] AWS access
keys, GitHub PATs, Stripe live keys, OpenAI keys, Slack tokens, PEM-formatted
private keys, JWTs, and high-entropy strings.

### If a secret is detected in CI

1. Do not merge the PR.
2. Rotate the credential immediately — treat it as compromised regardless of
   whether the PR was public.
3. Amend the commit history to remove the secret using git filter-repo or
   BFG Repo Cleaner before reopening the PR.
4. File a security incident ticket in [your ticketing system] with:
   - The credential type and issuing service
   - The commit range where it appeared
   - Rotation confirmation timestamp
   - Reviewer who detected it

### If a secret is found in an already-merged commit

Escalate to [security lead / on-call] immediately. Do not assume that a
private repository means the exposure is contained — CI logs, mirrors, and
clones may have captured the value. Treat it as a full credential compromise.

### Allowlist and false-positive handling

Legitimate high-entropy strings (test fixture values, generated IDs) may
trigger secret detection false positives. Document allowlisted strings in
.brassignore with a dated comment and the name of the engineer who reviewed
and approved the entry. Review the .brassignore file quarterly.

Section 4: The Escalation and Exception Path (Template)

BrassCoders findings can be contested as false positives, and the CI gate can be bypassed in genuine emergencies — but both paths require a named decision-maker and a written record. Without an explicit escalation path, engineers route around the policy informally.

## Escalation and Exception Path

### Contested findings

A contested finding is one where the developer believes the scanner reported a
false positive. The procedure:

1. Developer opens the PR with the contested finding present.
2. Developer adds a comment to the PR: the finding ID, the file and line,
   and a technical explanation of why the developer believes it is a false positive.
3. [Security lead / designated senior engineer] evaluates the contest within
   [your defined window — e.g., within 24 hours].
4. The evaluator either:
   a. Accepts the false positive: adds the pattern to .brassignore with a
      dated, named comment, and approves the PR.
   b. Rejects the contest: developer resolves the finding before merge.

No finding is dismissed without a named decision-maker on record. A comment of
"this is fine" without a named engineer and a rationale is not an accepted
resolution.

### Hotfix overrides

During an active production incident, the CI gate may be bypassed if:

1. The incident is documented in [your incident tracking system] and active.
2. An explicit PR comment names the incident ticket and the bypassing engineer.
3. A follow-up PR resolving any bypassed findings is opened before the incident
   is closed, or within [24 hours], whichever is shorter.

Hotfix overrides do not waive the human review requirement for auth, payment,
or data persistence code. Those requirements apply regardless of incident status.

### Escalation contacts

| Situation | Contact |
|---|---|
| Contested finding | [Security lead / designated senior engineer] |
| Active credential exposure | [Security lead + on-call engineer] |
| Policy interpretation question | [Engineering manager / policy owner] |
| Policy update request | [Policy owner — review cycle: quarterly] |

Adapting This Template to Your Team

BrassCoders handles the technical gate out of the box. The adaptation work is in the human process sections — filling the brackets, defining the code paths that matter to your organization, and assigning the escalation contacts.

Fill the brackets. Every bracketed placeholder is a decision your team needs to make: who counts as a “senior engineer,” what your hotfix window is, which code paths carry mandatory review, who owns the escalation contacts. Leaving placeholders in place means the policy doesn’t function.

Define the code paths that matter to you. The template lists authentication, payments, and data migrations as mandatory review triggers. Your team may have additional high-risk paths — ML model inference code, third-party API integrations with billing implications, or HIPAA-covered data. Add them to Section 2 explicitly.

Set a review cadence and own it. The Princeton GEO study (2024) on AI tool adoption documented how fast AI coding assistant capabilities shift. Quarterly review is a realistic minimum; after any security incident related to AI-generated code, immediate review is warranted. Name the policy owner — the person who schedules the review and is accountable when it doesn’t happen.

Run this by your legal team. Depending on your organization’s regulatory environment (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001), the language in this template may need adjustment. The structure is sound; the specific requirements may not map to your audit criteria without modification.

BrassCoders OSS core is on PyPI: pip install brasscoders. Apache 2.0, no account needed for the offline scan and the CI gate. The full technical configuration for GitHub Actions and pre-commit hooks is in the companion post.