Since launching the AI prompts and AI skills, they've become my preferred way to use Shift. This has always been the biggest indicator for Shift - do I use it myself. AI helps push Shift's automation to the level I always wanted. It's the best of both worlds: deterministic changes from Shift and contextual changes from AI.
Today I'm releasing the beta of AI Review. This is available as an add-on to any of the Laravel upgrade Shifts. After your Shift runs, AI performs a second pass on your upgrade. It reads through Shift's detailed comments, understands the context of your codebase, and automates additional changes. Effectively performing many of the final upgrade steps you would normally do as a developer.
Why a second pass?
Shift has always automated as much of the upgrade as it reliably can. When a change can be made confidently, Shift makes it. When there's risk of a false positive, Shift leaves a comment instead. That's still the right approach. A confident wrong change is worse than no change at all.
There will always be things a human should review. Honestly, that need human review. But there's a gap between what Shift reliably automates and what a human needs to do. That's where this AI Review fits.
How it works
When you add AI Review at checkout, it runs automatically after your Shift completes. Your PR will enter an [AI Review] state while it works. Under the hood, AI Review is powered by Claude (Opus 4.8).
The review is guided by the comments in the PR. The ones that already contain curated AI prompts run directly. Any others are reformatted specifically for AI. For example, Composer dependency changes are optimized to help the AI perform better and faster.
When it's done with its changes, the PR state is updated and a final comment is left with a summary of AI's changes. Of course, any changes are made in nice, atomic commits. Just like Shift.
Beyond the beta
Right now, AI Review is in beta. It's available for the Laravel upgrade Shifts, starting with Laravel 6.x Shift. Eventually, I want to add AI Review for all Shifts.
If you've already been using the AI skills to review your Shift PRs locally, think of the automated version, with tokens included. If you don't have access to AI or the local configuration, this provides a way to automate many of those final changes.
Currently the AI Review is a $9 add-on. It's completely optional. Again, it's offered as a way to automate work you're currently doing manually or with AI locally. As I gather more feedback and continue to refine the process, ideally this AI Review is just included with Shift.
