Azure Azure Sdk Tools Azure Sdk Tools

Report Architect Comments

When to Use

• Reviewing what human architects (language board approvers) commented on during a period
• Analyzing review themes or patterns from human reviewers
• Comparing human review feedback against AI-generated comments
• Understanding what architects focus on for a specific language

Understanding Architect Comments

This command returns comments written by human language board approvers in APIView. It excludes:

• Diagnostic comments (auto-generated by tooling)
• AIGenerated comments (written by APIView Copilot)
• Deleted comments

The set of approvers is determined from the APIView Permissions container — members of groups whose roles include "Architect" or "Deputy Architect" for the specified language. When no language is specified, all architect and deputy-architect group members are included.

Use --all-commenters to skip approver filtering and return comments from all users.

Defaults

Unless the user says otherwise, always apply these defaults:

• Environment: production
• Language: All languages (do not pass --language unless user specifies one)
• Format: JSON (do not pass --format)

Date Resolution

The user will typically specify a calendar month by name (e.g. "March", "January 2025"). Resolve to the full month date range:

When only a month name is given without a year, use the current year. Be careful with month lengths (28/29/30/31 days).

Running the Command

Step 1: Run the Command

Show the resolved command and run it immediately in a foreground terminal with a 120-second timeout (timeout: 120000). Redirect to a file since output can be very large.

Full terminal command (cleanup + run):

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path output -Force | Out-Null; if (Test-Path output/architect_comments_output.json) { Remove-Item output/architect_comments_output.json }; python cli.py report architect-comments -s <start_date> -e <end_date> | Out-File -Encoding UTF8 output/architect_comments_output.json

After the command completes, read the output file with read_file to get the JSON results. Summarize the findings for the user (total count, languages covered, common themes, etc.).

Step 2: Answer Follow-up Questions

For follow-up questions about the same data (filtering, counting, searching), read the output file with read_file instead of re-running the command. The file is at output/architect_comments_output.json.

Examples

# All architect comments for March 2026
python cli.py report architect-comments -s 2026-03-01 -e 2026-03-31

# Python architect comments only
python cli.py report architect-comments -s 2026-03-01 -e 2026-03-31 -l python

# All commenters (not just approvers)
python cli.py report architect-comments -s 2026-03-01 -e 2026-03-31 -l python --all-commenters

# Include reply comments (by default only first comment per thread is returned)
python cli.py report architect-comments -s 2026-03-01 -e 2026-03-31 -l java --include-replies

# YAML output
python cli.py report architect-comments -s 2026-03-01 -e 2026-03-31 --format yaml

# Staging environment
python cli.py report architect-comments -s 2026-03-01 -e 2026-03-31 --environment staging

Available Flags

Gotchas

• Output can be large: Redirect to file and use read_file rather than relying on terminal output.
• Date range filters by thread start time: Only threads whose first comment falls within the date window are included. A reply created during the window is excluded if the thread itself started before the window.
• Use python cli.py not .\avc: The avc.bat script may resolve to system Python.
• Do NOT use 2>&1: Merges stderr into stdout, corrupting JSON. Only redirect stdout.
• Do NOT use >: Produces UTF-16 in PowerShell 5.1. Use | Out-File -Encoding UTF8.
• Month end dates: February has 28/29 days, April/June/Sept/Nov have 30 days.
• Approver filtering: If no approvers are found for a language, no comments are returned. This can happen for less common languages with no registered board members.

Source: Azure/azure-sdk-tools — distributed by TomeVault.