Let Codex review draft PRs before they are ready for human review
What variant of Codex are you using?
Web / Codex Cloud GitHub code review
What feature would you like to see?
Our team keeps pull requests in draft while automation is still helping us shape the change. In our workflow, GitHub's Ready for review means exactly what it says: the PR is ready for a human teammate to spend time on it.
Codex currently breaks that workflow. Automatic Codex review waits until the draft is marked ready, so we have two bad choices:
- Mark unfinished work ready just to wake Codex, which invites humans too early.
- Keep the PR honestly marked draft and get no Codex review during the phase when automated feedback is most useful.
Cursor Bugbot gets this right. It is flexible enough to review draft PRs and review new pushes while they remain drafts. That lets automation find problems, the author fix them, and the PR become ready before any human is asked to review it. Codex should match that standard.
Workflow we need
- Open the PR as a draft.
- Codex and other automated reviewers review it.
- Push fixes and let automatic review run again as configured.
- Mark the PR ready only after automated findings and CI are clean enough for a human.
- Human review begins.
Ready for review should mean ready for human review, not ready for the automated reviewer to start.
Requested behavior
Make draft PRs eligible for the first-party managed Codex Cloud code-review product. Existing trigger preferences should apply regardless of GitHub's draft flag:
- On PR open includes opening a draft PR.
- On every push includes pushes while a PR remains draft.
- Smart Trigger can run while a PR is draft.
- @codex review works while a PR is draft.
This request is for the product configured at https://chatgpt.com/codex/settings/code-review, not a custom GitHub Action or a general GitHub connector posting an imitation review.
Acceptance criteria
- Codex can automatically review a newly opened draft PR.
- Codex can review new heads while the PR stays draft.
- Manual @codex review works on draft PRs.
- Marking the PR ready does not duplicate a review already completed for the same head SHA.
- Existing authorship, repository-selection, and quota controls still apply.
Additional information
Comparable working workflow
In our current workflow, Cursor Bugbot reviews draft PRs and subsequent pushes while they remain draft. The request is not to clone its implementation. Codex needs to match that lifecycle flexibility so Ready for review can remain the human handoff signal.
Official documentation
- Review GitHub pull requests with Codex says automatic reviews run when someone "opens a new PR for review." That wording reflects the current readiness gate, but Ready for review is the wrong lifecycle boundary for an automated reviewer.
Existing issue precedent
- #5669 requested inclusion of Dependabot-authored PRs and made the same contract argument: if the setting says Review all PRs, hidden classes of PRs should not be excluded. It was closed as completed.
- #19112 requests a persistent, event-driven PR review loop instead of manual triggering.
- #13597 requested configurable auto-review targeting by PR attributes, showing that review-trigger selection is already a product need.
- #38110 documents the current trigger choices: On PR open, On every push, and Smart Trigger.
- #15477 and #30858 concern automatic-review failures but explicitly discuss non-draft PRs, so they do not cover this request.
A search of all 329 issues carrying the code-review label and their indexed comments found no existing request that directly asks managed Codex Cloud code review to run while a pull request remains draft.
Out of scope
The open-source openai/codex-action offers a custom GitHub Actions bot. That is not equivalent to changing the first-party managed Codex Cloud review product and should not be treated as the fix.