Making code changes

When an investigation has worked out what’s wrong, the next step is usually to fix it. You can ask @incident to make the change, and it opens a pull request for you to review — built on everything the investigation already knows.

​

Asking for a change

In the incident channel, tag @incident and describe the change you want — fix a bug it identified, revert a risky change, add a guard. It opens a pull request against the right repository and posts its progress back into the channel as it works; when the PR is up, it’s linked to the incident like any other resource. Because the request runs with the full investigation behind it, you don’t have to re-explain the problem. The agent making the change starts from the investigation’s root-cause finding, the evidence behind it, and the code the investigation already read — so the change targets the actual cause rather than guessing from a one-line instruction. That means you can be brief:

@incident open a pull request to fix this.

Or point it at something specific when you already know the fix:

@incident this is the missing timeout on the payments client — add a sensible one and open a PR.

You can keep iterating in the channel: ask for adjustments and the same pull request is updated.

@incident can you also add a test that covers the timeout?

​

Who makes the change

By default, incident.io makes the change itself. A coding agent runs in an isolated, sandboxed container, makes the edit, and opens the pull request, with no setup beyond connecting your repositories. If your team already uses its own coding agent, you can delegate the work to it instead, so the fix comes from the tooling you’ve already tuned to your codebase. Which agent runs is an explicit setting, so you stay in control even when more than one is connected. See Delegating agents for what’s supported and how to choose.

​

Automatic code changes

Investigations can go one step further and propose a fix without being asked. When an investigation reaches high confidence in a root cause that’s addressable in code, it can open a pull request itself and announce it in the channel — turning a diagnosis straight into a proposed fix for you to review. This is off by default. If you’d like investigations to propose code changes automatically, get in touch and we’ll enable it for your organization.

​

Related