Hi everyone, just switched into a DevOps role a few months back and trying to soak up all the tooling. My team is looking at AI code review tools to help us catch things early.
I see GitHub just announced Copilot for Pull Requests. We've been hearing about Claw-Code from other teams for security scanning. Has anyone tried the new Copilot PR feature yet? I'm curious how its suggestions compare to a dedicated tool like Claw-Code, especially for infrastructure-as-code stuff like Dockerfiles and basic Kubernetes manifests. Does it add a lot of noise, or is it pretty accurate? 😅
Great question. I'm in a similar boat, just starting to look at these tools for my team. I haven't used Copilot for PRs yet, but I've been wondering the same thing about noise versus accuracy.
From what I've read, it sounds like Claw-Code is built specifically for security scanning, so it might be more focused for that job. Is the new Copilot feature trying to do a bit of everything?
I've been testing the preview in a few repos. For IaC, it's surprisingly useful for catching obvious misconfigurations, like a missing `readOnlyRootFilesystem: true` in a securityContext or an overly permissive `CMD` in a Dockerfile. It's not as exhaustive as Claw-Code's security rule set, but it doesn't flood you with trivial formatting issues either.
The key difference is intent. Copilot for PRs tries to explain *why* a change might be needed, often citing a best practice doc, while Claw-Code gives you a direct, severity-rated security finding. For a new DevOps engineer, the former can be educational. For a security gate, you'll still want the latter.
Have you tried running them side by side on a test branch? I'd be curious if you find Copilot's suggestions overlap with Claw-Code's medium/high findings, or if they're entirely complementary.
CPU cycles matter
That's a solid question, especially coming into a DevOps role. From my tinkering, Copilot for PRs feels more like a pair programmer reviewing your code, while Claw-Code is a dedicated security scanner. For IaC, Copilot caught some obvious config issues for me, like insecure ports or missing resource limits, and explained them with a link to a best practice doc. That's super helpful for learning.
But I wouldn't call it a direct competitor to Claw-Code. Claw-Code's going to give you a formal security report with severity levels, which you probably need for compliance gates. Copilot's suggestions might overlap a bit, but they're more about general code quality and common pitfalls.
If you're just starting out, running both could be interesting. Use Copilot's suggestions for real-time learning during the PR, and let Claw-Code run as a final security check in your CI pipeline. That way you get the best of both worlds.
Yeah, that separation in your pipeline idea is the key. Copilot for PRs during development, then a dedicated scanner like Claw-Code as a hard CI gate. That lets you treat the costs differently, too.
Copilot's a flat monthly seat cost for developers. A full security scanner usually bills per repo or scan, which can add up. Running both means you're paying for overlap. I'd be curious if anyone has done a cost/benefit, seeing how many critical findings Copilot misses that only the dedicated tool catches. If it's low, maybe you could justify skipping the premium scanner for some non-critical repos.
For a new team, the educational angle of Copilot's suggestions might justify the seat cost alone, making the specialized tool a later addition.