Notes from the team.
Writing about how AI-era engineering teams should ship — what we're building, what we're learning, and where production-aware review fits in.
- Launch
Code review that reads your system
Spinal is live for every team: production-aware code review that validates each pull request against your schemas, dashboards, and architecture — and proves findings by writing tests and running them.
Read post - Product
Your backend and frontend shouldn't share one code reviewer
A backend service and a frontend app fail in different ways. How Spinal configures a reviewer per repository — its instructions, the tools it can call, how it validates, and what it never sees.
Read post - Foundations
Why not just use an LLM to review your pull requests?
You can paste a diff into Claude and get a useful review today. So why use a product on top of the model? Because the model is the easy part; the harness around it is the work.
Read post - Engineering
Your CI runs the tests you wrote. Spinal writes the one you didn't.
AI review that 'writes and runs tests' sounds like another CI step. Spinal writes a focused test for a change, then runs it inside your existing CI.
Read post - Foundations
Production-aware code review: the discipline AI-era teams are missing
Most review is diff-aware — it reads the lines that changed and stops there. As agents flood teams with PRs, that breaks. A new discipline reads the running system and validates findings by execution.
Read post - Comparison
AI code review tools compared: how to choose in the agent era
Spinal, CodeRabbit, Graphite, Greptile, Cursor Bugbot, and GitHub Copilot. Every reviewer reads your diff; the real question is what evidence backs a finding before you trust it on a merge.
Read post - Enterprise
Self-hosted, EU-resident AI code review for regulated teams
Regulated teams want AI review without shipping source to an opaque US SaaS. How Spinal runs in your VPC or EU region, with SSO and a full audit trail — data residency as a default, not an upsell.
Read post - Foundations
What is Spinal? — The agent-first engineering harness for enterprise teams
Background reading on what Spinal is and why we built it. How production-aware PR review, runtime signals, and incident learning fit into the AI engineering era.
Read post