What This Example Shows
- A
HierarchicalSwarmwith a Lead Reviewer (director) coordinating four specialist workers: Security, Style/Lint, Test Coverage, and Architecture - Tightly scoped system prompts that force each reviewer into a single lens with an explicit output format
- A Lead Reviewer prompt that compresses every specialist’s findings into one structured Markdown PR comment with a hard verdict
- How to wire the swarm into a real GitHub PR — fetch the diff via the GitHub REST API and post the review back as a comment
- A realistic cost comparison against a senior engineer reviewing the same PR
This tutorial uses
HierarchicalSwarm on /v1/swarm/completions — included in every paid Swarms tier. For teams reviewing hundreds of PRs a day across multiple repos, upgrade at https://swarms.world/platform/account for higher rate limits and parallel execution.Why This Matters
A single human reviewer cannot hold security, style, test coverage, and architecture in their head on the same pass — they pick one lens, miss the others, and the PR sits for two days while the author context-switches onto something else. That latency is what actually kills shipping speed: not the reviewing, the waiting. The job here is not to replace your senior engineer’s signoff — it is to make sure that by the time they open the PR, every obvious finding is already in the thread, every missing test is already called out, and the only thing left for the human is the judgement call. One reviewer cannot catch everything. Four specialists running in parallel can.Step 1: Setup
Install the dependencies and grab your API key from https://swarms.world/platform/api-keys. You will also need a GitHub personal access token withrepo scope to post the review back.
Step 2: Define the Reviewer Team
The Lead Reviewer owns the final comment. Each specialist owns exactly one lens and is told to ignore everything outside it. The output format is rigid on purpose — the Lead has to merge four streams into one PR comment in a single pass.The Lead Reviewer’s output is the comment you post to GitHub. The four specialist outputs are the audit trail — every flagged issue is fully traceable back to the reviewer who raised it.
Step 3: Review a Single Diff
Start with a single diff pasted in directly. This is the loop you will wire to GitHub in the next step.REQUEST CHANGES, a CRITICAL finding for the SQL injection in both queries, and a Test Gap entry for reset_password. That is the comment you post.
Step 4: Wire It Into a GitHub PR
In production you do not paste diffs — you point the swarm at a PR number. GitHub exposes both the unified diff and the issue-comments endpoint on every PR.Running this from a GitHub Actions workflow on the
pull_request event gives every PR a structured review comment within ~30 seconds of being opened. The author fixes the obvious findings before a human ever looks at the PR — which is the entire point.Real Cost vs. a Senior Reviewer
| Scenario | Cost per PR | Monthly at 200 PRs | Annualized |
|---|---|---|---|
| Code Review Swarm (5 agents, mixed GPT-4.1 + Sonnet 4.5) | ~$0.08 | ~$16 | ~$190 |
| Senior engineer review (30 min @ $200/hr fully loaded) | $100 | $20,000 | $240,000 |
| Senior engineer review with 1-day PR latency cost (lost throughput) | $100 + opportunity cost | $20,000+ | $240,000+ |
Next Steps
- See Tools in Swarms to give the reviewers a real linter, AST parser, or test runner as a tool call
- Read MCP Integration to connect the swarm to your internal code-search or SAST server over MCP
- Browse the Hierarchical Workflow Example for the director-and-workers pattern with a deeper dive on routing