Code Panel Review

Code Panel Review

Orchestrate five specialized reviewer agents against the user's local changes and synthesize their findings into a single severity-ranked report.

Prerequisites (one-time)

• User must have authenticated the GitHub Copilot CLI: copilot auth login. The SDK reads OAuth credentials from the OS keychain (or COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN / GH_TOKEN / GITHUB_TOKEN if set).
• A GitHub Copilot subscription is required (this skill does NOT use BYOK in v1).
• Node.js 24+ available on PATH.

If the toolkit reports an auth error, tell the user to run copilot auth login and retry.

Procedure

Phase 1 — Resolve the review scope

Run these checks in parallel:

# committed-but-unpushed commits (the default scope)
git log --oneline @{upstream}..HEAD 2>/dev/null || git log --oneline ^origin/HEAD HEAD 2>/dev/null
# staged changes
git diff --cached --name-only
# unstaged (working tree) changes
git diff --name-only
# untracked files not covered by .gitignore
git ls-files --others --exclude-standard

Before asking the user anything, filter every bucket through the default excludes (see Phase 2 for the full default-exclude list, including **/.gitignore and **/yarn.lock). Files that would be excluded by default must not appear in the counts or lists shown to the user — otherwise you're asking them to decide on files that will never reach an agent. The only exception: if the user's invocation phrase explicitly names a default-excluded file (e.g. "review my gitignore changes"), drop that exclude for this run and do count it.

Interpret the filtered results:

1. Nothing in any of the four buckets after filtering → respond:

   Nothing to review — no committed-unpushed, staged, unstaged, or untracked changes found (after applying default excludes).

   Stop. Do not invoke the toolkit.

2. Staged and/or unstaged changes exist (post-filter) → ask the user:

   You have uncommitted changes: X staged, Y unstaged. Include them in the review? (y/n)

3. Untracked files exist (post-filter) → ask the user (list up to 10, elide the rest):

   You have N untracked files to potentially review:

   • path/one.kt
   • path/two.kt
   • ...

   Include them in the review? (y/n)

Ask each applicable question once; wait for the answer before moving on. If the user declines everything and there are no committed-unpushed changes either, treat it as "nothing to review".

Phase 2 — Invoke the toolkit

Before running the toolkit, verify Node is 24+:

node --version

If the major version is below 24, stop and tell the user:

This skill requires Node 24+. Detected <version>. Please upgrade Node (e.g. via nvm install 24 && nvm use 24) and re-run.

Build the toolkit arg list from the resolved scope, then run it in the background and poll progress at a fixed cadence. The toolkit can take several minutes because it spawns 5 Copilot agents in parallel; a silent blocking run is a poor UX, but streaming every event via the Monitor tool creates too many per-event notifications.

node .claude/skills/code-panel-review/toolkit/dist/index.mjs \
  --repo "$(pwd)" \
  --include-committed-unpushed \
  [--include-staged] \
  [--include-unstaged] \
  [--include-untracked] \
  [--exclude <glob> ...] \
  --allowed-hosts-file .claude/skills/code-panel-review/allowed-hosts.txt \
  2>&1

Include each --include-* flag only for buckets the user opted into. The 2>&1 redirect is important — it merges stderr (progress lines) with stdout so a single BashOutput read catches both.

Always pass --allowed-hosts-file pointing to allowed-hosts.txt in this skill directory. Reviewers are allowed web access for API/doc lookups, but every URL they fetch is checked against this allowlist at runtime; hostnames not in the file are denied. Without this flag, no URLs are approved (reviewers lose web access entirely). If the user needs to allow an additional host for a specific run, add --allowed-host <hostname> (repeatable) alongside the file.

Run pattern (20s polling):

1. Invoke Bash with run_in_background: true. Record the shell_id returned. Tell the user the panel is running and that you'll check in every 20 seconds.

2. Enter a polling loop. Each iteration:

   • Run sleep 20 via Bash (foreground, short). This gives the agents time to make progress between reports.
   • Call BashOutput with the shell_id. It returns the incremental output since the last read.
   • Parse the incremental output. You'll see lines like:
     • [panel 2026-04-18T…] security: starting (model=claude-opus-4.6)
     • [panel 2026-04-18T…] security: → view(src/foo/Bar.kt)
     • [panel 2026-04-18T…] security: turn complete
     • [panel 2026-04-18T…] security: finished in 37938ms
     • [panel 2026-04-18T…] security: failed: <reason>
     • PANEL_OUTPUT_DIR=/var/folders/.../panel-review-XYZ (stdout, signals completion)
   • Produce a single concise summary line for the user covering this 20s window (e.g. "security and bugs still reading files; resilience finished in 58s"). Don't paste raw event lines — summarize per reviewer.

3. Exit the loop when:

   • PANEL_OUTPUT_DIR=… appears (the happy path), or
   • All five reviewers have emitted either finished in …ms or failed: …, or
   • BashOutput reports the shell has exited.

4. Capture the PANEL_OUTPUT_DIR path from the output for Phase 3.

If the user asks "what's happening?" between polls, do an immediate BashOutput read and summarize — no need to wait for the next 20s tick.

Use --exclude to drop noise files before inviting the agents. Every file in the manifest costs agent context and may dilute findings. Before invoking the toolkit, scan the resolved file list and add --exclude flags for paths with no human-authored review value. The agents will not infer this — you must pre-filter.

Always apply these default excludes on every run (pass them on every invocation, regardless of what's in the manifest — it's fine if they match nothing):

--exclude "**/.gitignore" --exclude "**/yarn.lock"

Only drop a default exclude if the user explicitly asks to review one of those files (e.g. "review my gitignore changes").

Also consider excluding (apply when the resolved file list actually contains matches, and announce them before running):

• Other lockfiles: **/package-lock.json, **/pnpm-lock.yaml, **/Gemfile.lock, **/poetry.lock, **/Cargo.lock, **/go.sum, **/composer.lock, **/*.lockb
• Build / bundler output: dist/**, build/**, out/**, .next/**, target/**, **/*.min.js, **/*.bundle.js, **/*.map
• Vendored / generated: vendor/**, **/generated/**, **/*.generated.*
• Binaries / media: **/*.{png,jpg,jpeg,gif,svg,ico,webp,pdf,zip,tar,gz}

Pattern syntax (Node's path.matchesGlob): * = any chars except /, ** = any chars including /, ? = one char. A pattern without / is also matched against the basename, so yarn.lock alone catches yarn.lock anywhere in the tree.

Call out the exclusions you're applying in one line before running the toolkit, so the user can object:

Excluding from review: yarn.lock, dist/**, **/*.min.js. Proceeding.

If the resolved file list contains only files that would be excluded, tell the user and stop — there's nothing meaningful to review.

The toolkit:

• Builds a manifest of {path, changed_lines} entries (no file content — agents read files themselves via the SDK's read-only filesystem tool).
• Loads .code-panel-review.yaml from the repo root if present, otherwise uses defaults (Security=claude-opus-4.6, Performance=gpt-5.4, Resilience=claude-opus-4.6, Bugs=gpt-5.4, Compliance=gpt-5.4; all enabled).
• Resolves each reviewer's requested model against the SDK's listModels() via fuzzy match.
• Spawns enabled reviewers in parallel, validates each response against the finding schema (retries once on schema failure), and writes one JSON file per reviewer.

On success, the toolkit prints a single line to stdout:

PANEL_OUTPUT_DIR=/tmp/panel-review-<ISO-timestamp>

Phase 3 — Read the per-reviewer outputs

For each reviewer that was enabled, Read the file at <PANEL_OUTPUT_DIR>/<reviewer>.json (one of: security.json, performance.json, resilience.json, bugs.json, compliance.json).

If a <reviewer>.error.json exists instead, that reviewer failed schema validation twice — note the failure in the Panel summary section of the final report but do not fail the whole run.

Phase 4 — Synthesize

Follow prompts/SYNTHESIZER.md in this skill directory to cluster, dedupe, rank, and present the final report. Output is markdown in the chat, grouped by severity tier (see the synthesizer prompt for the exact layout).

Configuration (optional)

The user may place a .code-panel-review.yaml at the repo root to override defaults. See .code-panel-review.yaml.example in this skill directory for the schema. Unspecified fields fall back to defaults; unknown keys produce a warning (not an error) so the format is forward-compatible.

Non-goals (v1)

• Auto-applying fixes — this skill reports only.
• Reviewing remote branches or someone else's PR.
• CI integration.
• A fifth "architecture" reviewer or running the same lens across multiple models.
• Full-repo review when no changes exist.
• Caching or incremental review — each invocation is a fresh run.