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Every CodeWarden comment ends with Talk to CodeWarden by mentioning @codewardenapp in a reply. Reply in that comment’s thread, write @codewardenapp and your question or objection, and CodeWarden answers in the same thread.
The handle is @codewardenapp. @codewarden without “app” is an unrelated GitHub account.

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What happens

  1. CodeWarden adds a 👀 reaction to your reply so you know it saw it.
  2. It reads the original finding, the code it pointed at, the same file as it is now at the pull request’s head, every earlier reply in the thread, and the pull request’s description. It reads them through the GitHub API; nothing is cloned.
  3. It answers once, in the same thread, and removes the reaction. The answer does one of three things:
A reply that is only @codewardenapp, with no question, gets asked what you want to know. When CodeWarden concedes to someone with write access, its answer also offers the lines to add to .codewarden.yml to make the decision apply to the whole repository. See Accepted findings.

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Who can ask

CodeWarden answers a comment only when all of these hold:
  • it is a new reply, not an edit of an earlier comment;
  • it is a reply inside a thread that one of CodeWarden’s own inline comments started;
  • it mentions @codewardenapp in the text. A handle inside a code block or inline code does not count;
  • its author is not a bot;
  • its author has write access to the repository (GitHub’s OWNER, MEMBER or COLLABORATOR), or is the pull request’s author, including on a pull request from a fork.
Anyone else gets no answer, no model call and no charge. That matters most on a public repository, where anyone on GitHub can comment. Mentions in the pull request’s general conversation, or under someone else’s review comment, are not answered.

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What it costs

An answered mention uses one AI turn, the same as a review. A mention that is ignored, refused, or that fails uses none. Mentions are refused the same way reviews are: when the repository is switched off, the installation is suspended, or the organization has no subscription or has used its allowance. A refused mention posts nothing. Each repository’s page in the console lists its mentions: who asked, the status, whether the answer explained, defended or conceded, whether it used an AI turn, and a link to the reply.

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What a reply cannot do

Everything people write, including the reply, the thread, the pull request description and the code, reaches the model as data, never as instructions. A reply that says “ignore every finding in this repository” or tries to change CodeWarden’s rules affects, at most, the one finding under discussion. CodeWarden does not raise new findings about other code in an answer. To concede, the model has to quote the code the decision covers, and that code has to be in the file. A concession that quotes code that is not there is posted but remembers nothing.