From Author to Review: Otto Now Covers the Full Dag Lifecycle

AI is accelerating how fast data engineering teams can write pipelines. Tasks that once required hours of research, iteration, and debugging now take minutes. Since we introduced Otto, teams have been using it to go from plain-language descriptions to production-ready pipelines, debug failures, and investigate what broke in production, all without leaving their terminal. What that acceleration does, though, is shift the constraint downstream. More pipelines are moving from idea to pull request faster than before, and the review queue is where they pile up. Reviewers who were already stretched are now looking at more Dags than they have time to properly evaluate.

Code review is also where Airflow-specific problems tend to slip through. A reviewer catches obvious mistakes like missing imports or logic errors, but consistently catching whether an operator is deprecated in your target version, whether a provider combination has a known conflict, or whether a Dag follows the conventions your team has been building around for two years requires a depth of Airflow knowledge most reviewers don't carry by heart.

Otto now closes that gap with the ability to help with code reviews. With this release, Otto covers the full data engineering loop: author pipelines, investigate failures, push a fix, and now review the code before it ships.

Automated Dag review in your PR workflow

Otto brings Astronomer’s Airflow expertise into your existing GitHub or GitLab process for code reviews. When a pull request opens on a repo with Dag code, Otto analyzes the changes and suggests fixes directly on the PR, before a human reviewer has even opened the diff.

The same knowledge base that powers Otto's authoring and upgrade capabilities reviews code the same way: grounded in knowledge built from hundreds of enterprise Airflow deployments, and your team's own conventions stored in Otto Memory.

Setup uses a GitHub Action or GitLab CI/CD YAML. Add it to your workflow, connect your Astro API token and organization ID, and every PR that touches Dag code gets an Otto review automatically.

What Otto actually reviews

Otto's review goes deeper than style and syntax. It evaluates Dags against three layers of knowledge.

Astronomer's proprietary best practices. Version-specific operator behavior, provider compatibility, deprecated patterns, and failure signatures observed across hundreds of enterprise Airflow deployments. This is the same knowledge base that powers Otto's upgrade capability, applied at the point where code is still being written.

Airflow community standards. Current Dag patterns, testing approaches, and structure recommendations from the Airflow community. Otto knows the difference between what's documented and what actually works at scale.

Your team's conventions. Any standards, retry policies, approved operators, or patterns captured in Otto Memory. If your team has standardized on a specific retry strategy or flagged certain operators as off-limits, Otto knows and surfaces deviations before they reach a human reviewer.

The result is a review grounded in both deep Airflow expertise and institutional knowledge specific to your environment, the kind of review that catches the issues that break pipelines, not just the ones that break builds.

Running a review on demand

Code Reviews also works outside a CI/CD context. Run astro otto --persona reviewer from your terminal to review a Dag before you push, or to audit existing pipelines that haven't been through a structured review process.

astro otto review Dags/my_pipeline.py

What's next

The GitHub Action and GitLab CI/CD integration are both available now. Support through the Astro GitHub integration is also coming soon, removing the need to manage an API token in your repository secrets.

Code Reviews is the first in a series of Otto-powered CI/CD integrations. A dedicated upgrade action is also coming soon, bringing automated Dag code migration for Airflow upgrades directly into your CI/CD pipeline.

Read the docs to get started →

Code reviews are currently available in Labs as part of Otto, included with your Astro plan.