# Your team's coding rules aren't in the prompt, they're in the ingest > Source: > Published: 2026-09-08 00:15:04+00:00 Every AI code reviewer claims it respects your team's standards. Very few can tell you what those standards actually are. The test is mechanical. Ask the tool, or the vendor, one question: where do my rules live? If the honest answer is "we loaded a generic style guide plus whatever your PR description happened to say", then your standards aren't in the model at all. The reviewer is running on vibes and hoping your repo looks conventional enough to pass. The tools that genuinely track your rules share a shape: the standards are an input, not a hope. They read your rule files, your linter config, your past review comments, sometimes your docs. The review is judged against that artifact, which means when a comment fires you can ask "which rule?" and get a config line back, not a paragraph of model reasoning. That last part is the thing worth testing for. If a reviewer can't point to the specific rule it applied, it is not following your standards. It is approximating what it assumes standards look like. Those two feel identical for the first six months, then diverge exactly when you've stopped proofreading its output. A short checklist when you trial one: If the answer to all four is no, you bought a very chatty spellchecker that happens to be trained on GitHub. The eval that actually decides it: can your own reviewer reproduce one of your team's real past review decisions, given only your real rules file? Run that before you hand it a production PR.