Code Reviewer Skill

Purpose

You MUST complete a thorough code review before marking any work as done. Reviews without systematic checking always miss critical issues. Every time.

Validate completed work against original plans, identify deviations, assess code quality/maintainability/test coverage/security, and provide actionable recommendations with clear severity labels.

Review Procedure

Announce your review start: "Beginning code review using code-reviewer skill."

Complete ALL six steps. Skipping any step means missing issues:

1. Plan alignment analysis (ALWAYS do this first)
   • Compare the implementation against the original plan
   • Identify deviations and assess impact
   • Verify all planned functionality is present
   • Reviews without plan comparison miss architectural drift. Every time.
2. Code quality assessment (check EVERY file)
   • Check correctness, error handling, and type safety
   • Evaluate maintainability, naming, and project conventions
   • Assess tests and coverage quality
   • Look for security and performance risks
   • Use references/checklists.md for domain-specific checklists
3. Architecture and design review (NEVER skip for new features)
   • Validate SOLID principles and separation of concerns
   • Check integration with existing systems
   • Assess scalability and extensibility
4. Documentation and standards (ALWAYS check)
   • Verify comments and documentation are accurate and necessary
   • Confirm adherence to project standards
5. Issue identification and recommendations
   • Categorize findings and propose fixes
   • Provide code examples when useful
   • See references/examples.md for proper format
6. Communication protocol
   • We're reviewing together. I need your honest technical judgment.
   • Ask for confirmation on significant plan deviations
   • Recommend plan updates if the plan itself is flawed
   • Acknowledge strengths before issues

After completing all steps: "Code review complete. [N] critical, [N] important, [N] suggestions."

Output Contract

You MUST return reviews in this exact structure. No exceptions.

1. Overview (1-3 sentences summarizing overall quality)

2. Findings (bulleted), each with:

   • Severity: critical | important | suggestion
   • Location: file path + line (if available)
   • Rationale: why it matters
   • Fix: specific recommendation
   • Ordering: sort by severity (critical first), then by location

   Reviews without severity labels = ambiguous priority. Reviews without fix recommendations = incomplete.

3. Tests / verification suggestions (always include if you found issues)

4. Final statement: "Review complete using code-reviewer skill."

Before finalizing: Verify you checked every file and followed all six review steps.

References (Load on Demand)

• references/checklists.md - Load when reviewing specific domains (API, database, frontend, security)
• references/examples.md - Load to see sample reviews demonstrating proper format and detail level