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Control Center

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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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. The Bot login field fills in and is copyable

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.

Request a review from GitHub

Section titled “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
  • Comment @myapp review (or just @myapp) on the PR conversation

The bot reacts with 👀 to acknowledge, then replies when the review has started. 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

Section titled “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 lead 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

Section titled “Follow up in a review thread”

Reply inside any thread the bot is part of — an inline review comment it left, or an answer it posted. 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 prior thread as context, and the answer comes back in the thread.

Who the bot talks to

Section titled “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 → You → Profile & identity
  • You must be a member with a write role in the workspace that links the repository

Anyone else gets one polite reply explaining what is missing, and their words never enter the workspace.

What to expect

Section titled “What to expect”
Thing Behaviour
Acknowledgement 👀 reaction within about a minute — the sweep interval
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

Section titled “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; github_pr_conversation: is the prefix to look for

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.

Section titled “Related guides”