| name | agent-review |
| description | Use in /implement after committing, inside the draft PR, to review the committed diff. Dispatches a dependency-free review subagent fed the diff + review criteria and returns structured findings (severity / location / problem / fix). The recipe drives the address→re-review loop with a human exit gate; the pr-review-toolkit ceiling is an opt-in override of this skill. |
Agent Review
The review step of /implement's repo path. Runs on committed work (never unstaged changes), inside the draft PR. Dispatches a review subagent — fed the diff plus review criteria — and returns structured findings for the recipe to act on.
Dependency-free by default: a fresh install gets working review with nothing beyond dossier-mcp. The richer pr-review-toolkit specialist panel is an opt-in override of this skill (see Project overrides), not a built-in — so /implement never requires the toolkit.
Input
- diff — the committed change to review, as a ref range (default
origin/main...HEAD) or a PR number.
- criteria (optional) — focus areas; defaults below.
- context (optional) — the
plan-file path and the ticket / acceptance criteria, passed to the reviewer so it can check the change against intent.
Default review criteria (the floor)
- Correctness — does the code do what it claims; do its own commands/claims hold up when checked; logic errors, edge cases, off-by-ones.
- AC coverage — does the change actually satisfy the ticket's acceptance criteria.
- Silent failures / error handling — swallowed errors, missing guards, fallback that hides real failures.
- Internal consistency — self-contradiction; drift from the change's own stated contract.
- Convention consistency — does it match sibling code/patterns in the repo.
A project override can replace or extend these. If the AC / plan context isn't provided, the reviewer flags its absence as a gap rather than silently skipping the AC-coverage and intent checks.
Process
- Resolve the diff —
git diff <range> for a ref range, or gh pr diff <number> for a PR number — plus the list of changed files and the context (plan-file path + AC) if available.
- Dispatch a review subagent restricted to read-only tools (no Edit/Write/NotebookEdit — e.g. a read-only agent type), so the no-side-effects contract is structurally enforced, not just instructed. Instruct it to:
- read the diff and the changed files in full;
- check against the criteria and the AC / plan context;
- be skeptical and concrete — verify claims, don't praise; where a claim is checkable (a command, a path, an invariant), check it rather than trust it;
- return findings in the structured format below, plus a one-line verdict.
- Return the findings to the recipe. Do not loop or apply fixes here — the recipe owns the address→re-review loop and the human ready-to-publish gate (a primitive can't host an interactive gate).
Output / contract
- In: a committed diff (+ optional criteria / context).
- Out: a list of findings, each
{ severity: blocker | major | minor | nit, location, problem (1 sentence), suggested fix (1 sentence) }, plus a one-line verdict (mergeable as-is / mergeable with minor fixes / needs changes before merge). If a severity level has no findings, say so.
- Side effects: none — read-only review that dispatches a subagent. No commits, no file edits, no PR state changes.
Project overrides (the ceiling)
The toolkit ceiling is an override, not a default (per the dependency posture):
- User-level override (
~/.claude/skills/agent-review/) — dispatch pr-review-toolkit's panel (code-reviewer, silent-failure-hunter, type-design-analyzer, comment-analyzer, pr-test-analyzer) and aggregate their output into the same structured-findings format. The user with the toolkit installed gets the rich review everywhere; a fresh user isn't forced into the dependency.
- Project-level override — swap a stack-specific reviewer (e.g. a TypeScript- or Ansible-aware agent) or tune the criteria for the repo.
Overrides must honor the contract — input a diff, output structured findings, and stay read-only / side-effect-free — so the recipe's review loop keeps working unchanged.
Future scope
workflow-reviewer — a thin bundled reviewer agent tuned to a terse, critical, why-not-what style, replacing the general-purpose subagent as the floor. This is the self-sufficiency direction: the floor becomes good enough that the toolkit ceiling is rarely needed.