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

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. 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. 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