Building TREX: Code execution and artifact generation for AI code review

Shlok, a software engineer at Greptile, discusses the development of TREX, a novel code reviewer that not only examines pull requests but also runs the code to identify runtime issues, addressing limitations of traditional static code reviews. Inspired by Michael Fagan's 1976 introduction of formal code inspection at IBM, TREX was created to identify bugs that appear during code execution, such as logic errors and race conditions, which static reviews often miss. Initially developed as a separate product, TREX faced challenges with test generation and context sharing, leading to its integration with Greptile's main reviewer to better manage context and orchestrate dedicated agents for specific issues. This integration allows TREX to leverage various modalities, including screenshots, logs, and videos, to provide comprehensive and trustworthy artifact sets for each finding. The system is model-agnostic, enabling the use of multiple models across reviews without quality penalties, focusing on infrastructure, artifact generation, and evaluation rather than model intelligence. TREX utilizes sandboxed environments for reliable execution, ensuring that each review is a reproducible experiment with verifiable results, ultimately aiming to transform code review into an automated validation suite to eliminate bugs entirely.

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