Review turnaround fell to a third once the approval card became the conversation

Northwind builds control software for warehouse robots: one monorepo, a hundred and twenty engineers, and a toolchain that cross-compiles for four boards. Their problem was not writing code. It was the queue in front of every change.

Where they started

A pull request waited a day and a half on average, mostly because reviewers had to reconstruct what the author had actually run — which tests, against which board, with which flags. Half the review comments were questions, not findings.

What they changed

Every engineer got rovecode with the same policy file, pulled from the platform team's repository. The deny rules refuse anything that flashes a board or touches the deploy directory; the execpolicy prompts for the cross-compile scripts; everything else runs. The session log became the review artefact: reviewers read the approval cards and the tool rows instead of asking.

The hard part was the first two weeks. The hardware toolchain had a dozen scripts whose argument shapes the execpolicy had never seen, and each one needed a rule before the prompts stopped interrupting. Once the rules were written they were written for everyone.

What they measured

Review turnaround went from thirty-six hours to twelve. The number of review comments that were questions fell from roughly half to under a fifth. The rollout — policy, providers, training — took six weeks for the whole organisation, most of it in those first two.

What they would say to the next team

Write the policy for the toolchain before you roll out to the people who use it. The agent is the easy part.