self-review

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   # formatting, lint, docs, tests

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 switch 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 local fixtures instead? Keep at most one integration test that verifies the real network path works.
• Hardcoded paths: /tmp/foo in tests should be t.TempDir() for isolation and cleanup.
• Missing error context: error messages should help the user fix the problem (e.g., include "Install X manually: ").
• New // coverage-ignore annotations: each one needs explicit human permission. Your first instinct should be to write a test or refactor for testability instead.

Coverage check

Run just test 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