What this page covers
How Mesrai’s review output interacts with your branch protection rules, and when to dial up enforcement versus stay advisory.
Three policy modes
- Advisory (default) — Mesrai posts non-blocking comments. Your team decides what to act on.
- Request changes — opt in. Mesrai marks the review as changes requested when it finds an issue above your severity threshold. Branch protection then blocks merge.
- Auto-approve — opt in. Mesrai approves the PR when it finds nothing above threshold. Useful when an approval from the bot satisfies a required-reviewer count.
Enable the enforcement modes only once your team has aligned on the severity threshold and has CI you trust. Premature blocking creates friction; conservative thresholds buy trust.
When Request changes makes sense
- Security-critical paths where a critical finding must never merge
- Performance hot spots where regressions are expensive to roll back
- Mature repositories with a settled set of review rules
When Auto-approve makes sense
- Small, low-risk diffs (docs, tests, dependency bumps)
- Teams with strong CI + high test coverage
- Org policies that require a bot approval as one of several required approvals
Humans still own the call
Mesrai accelerates the feedback loop — it does not replace human judgment. Final merge decisions belong to your team. The right blocking policy is the one your team will defend on a Friday afternoon.