AI-Powered Code Reviews and Knowledge Transfer

So far in our journey, we have focused on the technical lifecycle of software: writing, testing, deploying, and securing applications. However, every professional engineer knows that this is only part of the story. The other, arguably more complex part, is the human element. Software development is a team effort, and its success depends on clear communication and effective collaboration. Yet, this is often where the most friction arises. Many have experienced the collaboration tax, the time and energy lost to inefficient processes. Code reviews can become bogged down in trivial style debates rather than focusing on critical logic. Pull request descriptions are often rushed and lack detail, leaving teammates to guess the context of a change. Repetitive feedback may be given time and again because institutional knowledge is not effectively shared.

This lesson focuses on using Windsurf to drastically reduce that tax. We move beyond treating AI as a solo coding partner and, instead, learn to harness it as a powerful collaboration engine. We will build a custom AI workflow to streamline the entire pull request process, conduct deeper and faster code reviews, and encode the team’s collective wisdom directly into the AI.

Automating the PR process with a custom workflow

The Pull Request (PR) is the fundamental collaboration unit in modern software development. A great PR, with a clear commit history and a detailed description, can make a code review a breeze. A poor one can waste hours of your team’s time. Let’s automate the process of creating great PRs.

Instead of performing a series of one-off prompts, we will build a reusable, multi-step Workflow. This will become our go-to tool for preparing any change for team review.

Building the /pr-prep workflow

Let’s imagine our team has a standard process for every PR: we need a conventional commit message, a ...