Talk to Control Center from a GitHub PR

This guide shows you how to work with Control Center without leaving GitHub: request an AI review from the PR page, ask the bot a question in a comment, and keep the conversation going in its review threads.

The bot is your server’s own GitHub App — the same one that already signs people in and runs background work. Nothing new is registered, and nothing has to be reachable from the internet: the server discovers what was said on GitHub by polling, so a laptop behind NAT behaves exactly like a public deploy.

Prerequisites

• The server has its GitHub App registered and installed, with Pull requests: read and write (for comments, threads and reactions) and Issues: read (for the comment search). Both are already in that guide’s permission list
• The repository is linked to a workspace in Control Center
• No webhook URL, no tunnel, no callback — there is nothing to configure on the network side

Find your bot’s name

The bot’s login is <appslug>[bot], where appslug is the name you gave the app when registering it.

1. Go to Settings → Server → Single sign-on and scroll to the Provider apps card
2. Open the GitHub block and click Test
3. Copy Bot login when it fills in. If it still shows the empty hint, the login is always <appslug>[bot] — type that, or the short @appslug

GitHub does not offer app accounts in its @ autocomplete, so the login has to be typed — that is why the settings card makes it one click to copy. The [bot] suffix is optional: @myapp and @myapp[bot] both address the bot.

Pick a distinctive app name

The short form is matched as text. If a human GitHub user happens to share your app’s slug, mentioning that user by the short form also reaches the bot. The full @myapp[bot] form is always unambiguous.

Request a review from GitHub

Two ways, both starting the same seeded pr_review pipeline the Ask AI button starts:

• Add the ai-review label to the PR. This is the closest thing GitHub offers to assigning the bot as a reviewer — app accounts cannot hold the native requested-reviewer slot. There is no comment to react to, so nothing is posted on GitHub; the review starts in Control Center
• Comment @myapp review (or just @myapp) on the PR conversation. The bot reacts with 👀, then replies when the review has started (or that one is already running)

The reviewers work in the PR’s review space; read and publish the findings as in Use AI-powered review. Publishing back to GitHub stays a decision you make in Control Center — starting a review from GitHub does not publish anything to GitHub on its own.

The label fires once per PR: adding it is the ask, and it is not re-armed when removed and re-added. To run a review again — after a push, say — mention the bot.

Ask a question

Comment on the PR conversation:

@myapp why does the flaky test in runner_test.dart fail on CI but not locally?

What happens, in order:

1. The bot reacts with 👀 so you know the comment was seen
2. The question is posted into the PR’s review space as you — same attribution as if you had typed it in Control Center
3. An agent answers in the space, and the answer is posted back on the PR as a comment that @-mentions you

A question on a PR with no review yet wakes the workspace’s CEO agent; once a review has run, the agent that spoke last answers, so follow-ups land with whoever has the context.

Follow up in a review thread

Reply inside an inline review thread the bot is part of — a diff comment it left, or an answer it posted in that thread. No mention is needed; the thread is the addressing:

> @myapp the retry loop looks O(n²) to me

what would the complexity be with the bounded queue instead?

Multi-turn works the same way: each reply is another question in the same conversation, with the review space as context, and the answer comes back in the thread.

A follow-up on the PR conversation timeline is a new top-level comment, so it still needs an @mention.

Who the bot talks to

A GitHub comment arrives as little more than a login, so the bot resolves the author before doing anything:

• Your GitHub account must be linked to your identity in Control Center — sign in with GitHub, or paste a token, from Settings → Workspace → Profile & identity → Code hosting
• You must be a member with a write role (member, admin, or owner) in the workspace that links the repository

Anyone else gets one polite reply explaining what is missing — an unknown login (unlinked, or linked but not a member here) and a read-only role are the two cases — and their words never enter the workspace. The ai-review label is not gated this way: it has no author, so it starts the review in the workspace that already links the repo.

What to expect

Thing	Behaviour
Acknowledgement	👀 on a comment within about a minute — the sweep interval. The ai-review label has no comment to react to
Answers	Posted as the bot (the app), in the lane the question was asked in
In-space attribution	The question is yours; the agent runs on your behalf, under the space’s autonomy settings
Reviews	Findings land in the review space; publishing to GitHub is manual

The roughly-one-minute latency is the trade for needing no inbound network access at all. Nothing about the sweep is urgent, and nothing is lost while the server is offline — a comment that arrives during downtime is caught on the next sweep.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens for a comment that mentions the bot.

• Is the app installed on the account that owns the repo, and the repo linked to a workspace? An unlinked repo is skipped before anything is recorded, so linking it later still delivers
• Is your GitHub account linked, and are you a member with a write role? Check the PR for the bot’s refusal reply — it says which
• Still nothing? The server log names the sweep and the PR when something fails; look for pr_conversation: (the poller) and github_pr_conversation: (the bridge)

The label does not start a review.

It fires once per PR. If a review already ran, or the label was added before the server ever saw the PR (the first sweep records the backlog silently rather than storming it), mention the bot instead — @myapp review always starts one unless a review is already in flight.

The bot’s answer never arrived on GitHub.

The answer itself is never lost — it is in the PR’s review space in Control Center. A posting failure (GitHub down, permissions changed) is logged and the reply is not retried; ask again in the thread if it matters.

Related guides

• Create the GitHub App: the registration the bot is born from
• Use AI-powered review: reading the findings a mention-started review produces
• Set up GitHub integration: linking your own GitHub account, which is what the bot resolves you by
• Use spaces: the room all of this lands in