AI Can Speed Up Code Review — but Merge Decisions Still Need Deterministic Guardrails

AI tools can accelerate pull request workflows by summarizing diffs, suggesting fixes, and reducing reviewer fatigue, but merge decisions should rely on deterministic policy rather than probabilistic AI judgment. GitHub provides useful primitives like protected branches and CODEOWNERS, but these static configurations break down as teams grow and need context-aware governance. Teams need a dedicated merge policy layer that enforces consistent, auditable rules based on change scope, file paths, and multi-domain ownership requirements.