Quickstart

Sign up, connect Azure DevOps with a personal access token, and watch ADO Pilot review a real pull request — about ten minutes end to end.

Last updated 2026-07-09

This walkthrough takes you from no account to a completed AI review on a real pull request in about ten minutes. You don't need to install the Marketplace extension first, and you don't need a credit card. Running a review during setup is optional — if you don't have a pull request handy, skip it and ADO Pilot reviews your next one automatically.

Before you start, have these ready:

An Azure DevOps Services organization. To watch a review run during setup, have an open pull request in it ready — this is optional, and you can skip it and let your next PR trigger the first review.
A personal access token (PAT) for that organization with the scopes listed in Creating a personal access token. If you don't have one yet, create it now — the wizard asks for it in step two.

Go to https://adopilot.dev and click Get Started Free. It opens the ADO Pilot app, where the landing page splits in two: a product overview on the left, and an auth card with Get Started and Sign In tabs on the right. Get Started is selected by default.

Enter your work email in the you@company.com field.
Enter a password (minimum twelve characters) in the At least 12 characters field.
Tick I agree to the Terms of Service. The Create Account button is disabled until you do.
Click Create Account.

The wizard redirects to a five-step onboarding flow that opens on Connect to Azure DevOps (the wizard sidebar labels this Step 2 of 5 — Step 1 is the signup you just completed).

Step 2 — Connect to Azure DevOps

On the Connect to Azure DevOps card, choose Personal Access Token and paste credentials.

Click Personal Access Token.
Paste your PAT into the Paste your PAT here field.
Under Your first review, choose how to start:
- Run my first review now (default) — paste the full URL of an open pull request into the Pull Request URL field (for example, https://dev.azure.com/org/project/_git/repo/pullrequest/42).
- Skip for now — enter your organization name instead (for example, contoso). No PR is needed now; ADO Pilot reviews your next pull request automatically once setup finishes.
Click Connect & Continue.

The wizard validates the PAT and provisions a tenant for your organization, including creating service hook subscriptions in your Azure DevOps projects. If you supplied a PR, it also starts a first review against it. On success it advances to step three.

If the PAT is missing a scope or has expired, you'll see a specific error. See Troubleshooting PAT errors for the resolution for each error code.

Step 3 — Configure repositories

By this point, service hook subscriptions are usually already active in your Azure DevOps projects — they were created during provisioning in Step 2 — and future pull requests will trigger reviews automatically. In rare cases, subscription creation can fail with a permission error even though the rest of setup succeeded; if reviews never start on a later pull request, see Reviews never started: service-hook permission error.

If you started a review in step two, this card is titled Your first review and runs that review in the background while you confirm settings. If you skipped it, the card is titled Configure repositories and confirms that your next pull request is reviewed automatically — there's nothing else to start now.

Click Continue to accept the defaults — all repositories enabled, default branch filters, default exclusion patterns. This step saves your per-repository settings.

Step 4 — Choose a plan (or skip)

The Select a plan card shows the paid tiers side by side. To stay on the free trial, click Continue with N free credits, where N is your remaining trial allowance. To start a paid plan now, pick one and follow the Stripe checkout flow.

Two-factor authentication is not required for this step

Picking a plan here does not require two-factor authentication — account security settings aren't available until onboarding finishes, so there's nothing to enroll yet. Once your tenant is set up, opening the Stripe billing portal, changing the overage cap, or converting a trial to a paid plan early from the dashboard will ask an org admin to recently re-confirm their identity (a "step-up" check): a fresh authenticator code if they have two-factor authentication enrolled in Settings → Security, their account password if they sign in with a password, or a one-time code we email to their current address if they sign in without a password (a magic link, an email code, or Sign in with Microsoft). Two-factor authentication is not required for any of this. See Step-up re-authentication for details.

The free-trial path does not collect payment details. Trial credits are consumed identically to paid credits.

Step 5 — You're all set

The final card displays You're all set!. At this point:

Your tenant is provisioned in ADO Pilot.
Service hooks are installed in the Azure DevOps projects you selected.
If you started a first review, it's either complete or running in the background.

If you supplied a PR in step two, open it and watch the PR-level summary comment progress from review queued to review in progress to a final PASS, ADVISORY, or FAIL verdict with a findings summary. Inline comments arrive once the review is complete. If you skipped the first review, open or update any pull request in a monitored repository — the review starts automatically within a few seconds.

What to do next

Make AI review a required check. Add the ai-pr-review status check (genre adopilot) as a branch policy in Azure DevOps to gate merges on review outcome. See Setting AI review as a required PR check.
Tune what gets reviewed. Add or adjust file exclusion patterns, branch filters, and per-repository toggles in the management portal. See Settings hierarchy.
Install the Marketplace extension. Optional. Adds a Run AI Review button to the PR action menu and a settings hub with connection health status and a manual review trigger inside Azure DevOps. See Installing the extension.