I built an unattended Claude Code loop that reviews PRs and works my Jira backlog

A developer built an unattended Claude Code plugin, ultracode-live-engineer, that automatically reviews Slack-mentioned PRs, follows up on its own PRs, and picks up Jira tickets. After 163 wake-ups, it reviewed 32 PRs, fixed 4 PR follow-ups, and moved 13 tickets forward, with an idle pass optimized to be 58% faster and use 30% fewer agent calls. The developer emphasizes a non-negotiable rule to escalate ambiguous cases to humans rather than guessing.

Every developer knows this Tuesday: you're deep in a bug, Slack pings with "can you review this PR?", and by the time you get back to your own code you've lost the thread. Meanwhile the Jira backlog sits there — every ticket in it legitimate, and every one losing to whatever's on fire that day. php flowchart LR S "Slack ping" -- C1 "stop coding" -- R "review PR" -- C2 "lost the thread" B "Jira backlog" -.- |"loses to\nwhatever's urgent"| N "stays untouched" Neither task needs me specifically — just consistent judgment, on a schedule that doesn't depend on how busy I am. So I built ultracode-live-engineer , a Claude Code plugin that wakes up on its own and handles both. php flowchart TD W "⏰ Wake" -- P1 & P2 & P3 P1 "👀 Slack Review<br/ mention + PR link → review" P2 "🔁 PR Follow-up<br/ fix feedback on own PRs" P3 "🎫 Jira Selection<br/ pick up a ticket" P3 -- I "🛠️ Implement<br/ isolated worktree" I -- |success| PR "✅ Open PR" I -- |ambiguous| H "🚧 Escalate<br/ Jira comment + Slack DM" H -.human replies.- P3 One rule is non-negotiable: when it's not sure, it doesn't guess. Ambiguous cases get parked and handed to a human — never merged, never silently skipped. I let it run and log every pass. 163 wake-ups later: flowchart TD subgraph Totals "Zero interrupts to me" direction LR A "32 PRs reviewed" B "4 PR follow-ups fixed" C "13 tickets moved forward" end Partway through, I noticed the "nothing to do" pass — the most common one — was the slow one. Three independent checks were running one after another instead of at once, and mechanical yes/no checks were each burning a full AI call. Fixing both: flowchart LR subgraph Before "Idle pass — before" direction TB d1 "190s median" d2 "10 agent calls" end subgraph After "Idle pass — after" direction TB e1 "79s median" e2 "7 agent calls" end Before -- |parallelize + batch| After 58% faster, 30% fewer agent calls — for the case that happens most. The industry numbers aren't about typing speed — they're about waiting to be noticed. LinearB's 2026 benchmarks 8.1M PRs put average-team PR pickup at 4–16 hours before review even starts; SmartBear's review research puts a manual review session at 60–90 minutes once someone sits down with it. flowchart LR subgraph Industry "Industry LinearB / SmartBear " direction TB i1 "Pickup: 4-16h average team" i2 "Review session: 60-90 min" end subgraph Loop "This loop" direction TB l1 "Pickup: next wake minutes " l2 "Full pass incl. review: 8.5 min" end One honest twist: DORA's 2025 report found that as AI-authored code volume rises industry-wide, human review time has actually gone up 441%, and 31% more PRs merge with zero review. AI made writing code faster — it didn't remove the review bottleneck. That's exactly why the escalate-to-human rule exists here instead of an autopilot that just merges. claude /plugin marketplace add AlvaroRaul7/ultracode-live-engineer Repo: https://github.com/AlvaroRaul7/ultracode-live-engineer https://github.com/AlvaroRaul7/ultracode-live-engineer