How long does a review take?

Most ADO Pilot reviews complete in 2 to 5 minutes; large pull requests or high AI-provider load can extend that. What affects duration and what to expect.

Last updated 2026-07-09

A typical ADO Pilot review completes in 2 to 5 minutes. In rare cases — for example, during high AI-provider load — a review can take up to 10 minutes, or very occasionally longer. This page explains what affects duration and what each step is doing while you wait.

Typical timing by PR size

PR size	Typical duration	Worst case at the 95th percentile
Small — 1 to 3 files, fewer than 500 lines	2 to 3 minutes	about 5 minutes
Medium — 5 to 15 files, 500 to 1,500 lines	3 to 5 minutes	about 7 minutes
Large — 20 or more files, 1,500 or more lines	5 to 10 minutes	up to ~10 minutes

These ranges assume a healthy AI provider. Actual times vary with code complexity and provider load.

What the review is doing while you wait

queued                        under a second
  fetch diff and enrichment    ~10 to 30 seconds
first-pass analysis            1 to 3 minutes
second-pass refinement         1 to 3 minutes
finalize and post              under a second

Queued. ADO Pilot records the review and acquires the concurrency slot for that pull request. Only one active review runs per PR at a time — reviews for other PRs in the same organization run in parallel and are not held up by it.
Fetch and enrich. The diff comes from Azure DevOps. Code-structure summaries and static-analysis findings are computed and attached to the review context.
First-pass analysis. ADO Pilot runs a high-recall sweep of your diff to surface every potential issue.
Second-pass refinement. ADO Pilot re-evaluates each candidate finding, drops the false positives, and writes the final comment text. See Why some findings are dropped for the rationale.
Finalize. Confirmed findings post as inline comments, the tracking comment finalizes to PASS, ADVISORY, or FAIL, and the ai-pr-review status check updates.

Why some reviews are slower

Things that make a review faster:

Smaller diff (fewer files, fewer lines).
Simple code without deep cross-file dependencies.
A healthy AI provider.

Things that make a review slower:

Larger diffs, especially over 1,500 changed lines.
High AI-provider load — requests queue under heavy traffic.
Rare: Azure DevOps API delays when fetching the diff or posting comments.

When a review takes longer than expected

Most reviews complete within 5 minutes. If a review has not finished within roughly 10 minutes — for example, during high AI-provider load — ADO Pilot cancels the in-flight request and re-runs the same analysis on a more reliable path:

The review still completes, with the same findings format and the same tracking-comment lifecycle. You will not see a difference in the output.
The extra time comes from the wait before the switch, not from the fallback path itself — once it switches, the review finishes quickly.

This path is reserved for the rare cases where the primary path has genuinely stalled — most reviews never need it.

Where to see the duration

The tracking comment's footer carries the wall-clock duration of the run:

<sub>ADO Pilot v{semver} · [full review](https://app.adopilot.dev/dashboard/reviews/{runId}) · [settings](https://app.adopilot.dev/dashboard/settings) · model: {model} · took 2m 41s · run id: `{runId}`</sub>

The full review detail page (linked from "full review" in the footer) shows the total duration alongside queued and completed timestamps so you can see the wall-clock span of the run.

Speeding up your reviews

The biggest lever is PR size. A 500-line review is meaningfully faster than a 5,000-line review and almost always produces better findings, because the model can hold more of the change in working context. If you have a large refactor to ship, split it into per-subsystem PRs. Each one reviews quickly, and the rolling feedback is more useful than one slow verdict on the whole change.