The automatic reviewer posts a review; a merge check reads it and holds the pull request until every finding it raised has a reply. Deciding whether a review had arrived at all was done by searching its text for the heading Pull request overview.

On 2026-09-18 the reviewer began posting a shorter note — a verdict line and a sentence or two — with no such heading. The phrase was gone, so six pull requests that had each been reviewed minutes earlier all reported that the review had not landed. The day before, the check had been promoted to a required one, so that report stopped being a note a reader could see past and became a block with no way around it: replying to the findings did not help, because the check was waiting for a review it could not see.

The check now recognises a review by who posted it rather than by how it is worded, and reads the text only to tell a review apart from the reviewer declining to review — which it still does. A future change of wording cannot hide a review again.