| name | self-review |
| description | Review your own changes before creating a pull request. Use this before running create-pr, or whenever you want to check that your changes are clean, correct, and well-tested. Trigger when: about to create a PR, finished a chunk of work, or asked to review changes. |
Self-Review
Run through these checks before creating a PR or declaring work complete. The goal is to catch the things a human reviewer would flag, before they have to.
Mechanical checks
Run all of these — they're fast and catch the most common issues:
just check
Fix any failures before proceeding. Don't skip checks because they passed locally last time — the code may have changed.
Review the diff
Run git diff origin/main...HEAD and read through it. Look for:
- Dead code: unused imports, variables, functions that were left behind during refactoring.
- Redundant test logic: tests that just mirror the implementation (e.g., a test with the same match arms as the code it's testing). Good tests validate against external reality or test behavior, not structure. If a test would still pass after introducing a bug in the code, it's not testing anything useful.
- Network calls in tests: can any test that hits the network use
file:// URLs or local fixtures instead? Keep at most one integration test that verifies the real network path works.
- Hardcoded paths:
/tmp/foo in tests should be tempfile::tempdir() for isolation and cleanup.
- Missing error context: error messages should help the user fix the problem (e.g., include "Install X manually: ").
- New
// nocov annotations: each one needs explicit human permission. Your first instinct should be to write a test or refactor for testability instead.
Coverage check
If cargo-llvm-cov is available, run just check-coverage and review the output. If new code is uncovered, address it before the PR — don't rely on CI to catch it. See the coverage skill for how to approach coverage gaps.
Final gut check
Ask yourself: if someone else wrote this diff, what would I flag in code review? Common things to catch:
- Functions that panic where they should return errors (or vice versa)
- Thin wrapper functions that exist only for testability but aren't actually tested
- Comments that describe what the code does rather than why
