AI ate your easy; can review brain-fry be subdued with CI/CD?

Description and use

Automating checks for AI-generated code using test coverage, mutation testing, CRAP scoring, static analysis, and automated refactoring reduces review fatigue and simplifies PR reviews.

Problem

AI-generated code in PRs causes review fatigue and quality issues, requiring manual checks that drain developer bandwidth.

Outcome

PRs became smaller, clearer, and easier to review; developers reported reduced fatigue and faster turnaround.

Workflow

• 1. Configure PHPUnit to generate coverage reports. 2. Run Infection for mutation testing using coverage data. 3. Compute CRAP scores from coverage and cyclomatic complexity. 4. Apply static analysis rules to detect conventions and vulnerabilities. 5. Execute automated refactoring rules on legacy or new code. 6. Publish all reports as CI artifacts for PR authors and reviewers. 7. Reviewers focus on high‑risk areas highlighted by metrics, reducing manual effort.

Evidence

We shopped around and landed on the following for this experiment: Test coverage reports, Mutation testing, C.R.A.P. scoring, Static analysis, Automated refactoring.

Source

It took a bored developer’s weekend and an afternoon of the team’s time to get all this work into our pipeline.

Source

We already had our tests running across multiple test runner jobs, splitting them by runtime to even out their finishing times to approximately the same time.

Source