reviewing-code_skill

Overview

This skill helps you perform practical, high-value code reviews for pull requests, branch changes, or diffs. It focuses on substantive issues like correctness, tests, complexity, performance, duplication, and side effects rather than linting or style. Use it to get a clear, prioritized list of problems and suggested fixes you can act on quickly.

How this skill works

The skill inspects diffs from a PR URL, current branch, or uncommitted changes and evaluates each modified file for completeness, error handling, test coverage, performance, and duplication. It can optionally run external analysis tools (if available) and synthesize their output into a single, prioritized review. The output highlights must-fix bugs, recommended improvements, and minor notes with clear file/line pointers and risk explanations.

When to use it

• Before merging a pull request to catch logical bugs and missing tests
• When you want an objective assessment of test coverage and edge cases
• To evaluate the complexity impact of a proposed change
• When performance-sensitive code or hot paths are modified
• If you suspect duplicated logic or unintended side effects

Best practices

• Provide the PR description or commit messages so intent is clear
• Run the review on the full diff (not individual hunks) to avoid missing context
• Prioritize fixes that multiple tools or reviewers agree on
• Focus comments on behavior, tests, and risks—not formatting
• If unsure about intent, ask a clarifying question before requesting changes

Example use cases

• Reviewing a GitHub PR URL to find missing error handling and test gaps
• Assessing a feature branch for unnecessary new abstractions or complexity
• Checking a change that touches hot loops or I/O code for regressions
• Reviewing uncommitted changes locally to decide whether to add tests
• Synthesizing findings from multiple analysis tools into a single action list