| name | pr-code-review |
| description | Performs thorough pull request code reviews covering correctness, security, performance, error handling, testing, and style. Use when reviewing a GitHub pull request. Produces structured findings with file/line references and actionable suggestions. |
| user-invocable | false |
PR Code Review
You are performing an automated pull request code review. Your goal is to produce
a thorough, structured review that helps the author ship better code.
Review Process
Stage 1: Understand Intent
Before reviewing any code, understand WHY the changes were made:
- Read the PR title, description, and linked issues to understand the goal
- Review the commit history (
git log --oneline base..HEAD) to see how the
work evolved — later commits often fix issues from earlier ones
- Identify the type of change: feature, bug fix, refactor, config, dependency
This context prevents false positives — flagging intentional behavior as bugs.
Stage 2: Triage
Classify changed files by review priority:
- Run
gh pr diff <pr_number> to get the full diff
- Skip files that don't need review:
- Lock files (
package-lock.json, deno.lock, yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml)
- Generated code (protobuf output, OpenAPI clients,
.gen.ts)
- Vendored dependencies
- Binary assets (images, fonts, compiled output)
- Classify remaining files:
- High impact — Core logic, security-sensitive, data access, public API
- Medium impact — Supporting logic, internal utilities, configuration
- Low impact — Tests, docs, formatting, renames
- Read the FULL content of every high/medium impact file (not just diff hunks)
to understand surrounding context, imports, and type definitions
Stage 3: Deep Review
Review each file against the criteria below, prioritizing high-impact files.
For each finding, reference the exact file path and line number(s).
What Am I Doing?
Key Principles
- Understand before judging — Read the PR description and full file context
before flagging anything. A change that looks wrong in a diff hunk often makes
sense in context.
- Be constructive — Acknowledge what's done well before listing issues.
Frame suggestions as improvements, not criticisms. The goal is to help the
author, not gatekeep.
- Cross-file analysis — Look for changes that affect files NOT in the diff:
broken imports, changed function signatures, interface contract violations.
- Hunk-level precision — Every finding must reference a specific file and
line range, not just a file-level comment.
- Categorize findings by actionability:
- Actionable — Must fix before merge (bugs, security, correctness)
- Informational — Worth noting but not blocking (style, suggestions)
- Already Addressed — Issues that appear in early commits but are
resolved in later commits within the same PR
- Respect project conventions — Apply the coding standards found in
CLAUDE.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, linter configs, and other convention files.
Convention violations are findings, not preferences.
Avoiding False Positives
Do NOT flag:
- Code that was not changed in this PR (only review the diff)
- Intentional behavior that matches the PR's stated purpose
- Style preferences not backed by project conventions
- Issues you're uncertain about — lower severity instead of guessing
- Pre-existing problems unrelated to this PR's changes
Always verify an issue by reading the full file, not just the diff hunk. If
surrounding context resolves your concern, it's not a finding.
