Default Code Review

Default Code Review

Orchestrate an adversarial review with no language-specific knowledge base. The skill resolves the diff, reviews it under the default-code-reviewer mandate beside this file, then runs the findings-auditor agent to red-team the findings before anything reaches the user. Two passes: one attacks the code, the next attacks the findings.

This is the fallback path: try a language-specific kreview skill first (e.g. go-code-review, lua-code-review, vue-code-review, nestjs-code-review, typescript-code-review). Reach for this skill only when none matches the diff's primary language or framework — it substitutes universal correctness/security axes for a per-language mistake catalog, so it catches fewer idiom-specific issues than a dedicated reviewer would.

This skill is the standalone path. It resolves a target, reviews the diff under the mandate beside it, and spawns one subagent to audit what it found. The CI review flow does not run this skill: a trusted step injects the same mandate into the run's own prompt. Both paths review the diff themselves and share the mandate, the catalogs and the auditor; only the dispatch differs. See docs/decisions/review-pipeline-cost.md.

Input

Accept any of:

• Diff file path → read that file; it is the diff, already taken by the caller
• GitHub PR URL → fetch with gh pr diff <url> and gh pr view <url> --json number,title,body,baseRefName,headRefName
• File paths → read the files; use git diff (or git diff <base>...HEAD) for changes
• Pasted diff → use directly

Flags (parse from $ARGUMENTS, strip before resolving the target):

• --no-audit → skip the findings-audit pass. The code review still runs. Default is to run both.

Process

1. Resolve the target

Take the diff from the path the invocation names, reading it once. Where it names none, determine the diff and the full list of changed files. If the diff is empty, say so and stop. For a PR, capture title/body so the reviewer can respect stated intent.

2. Adversarial review (you are the reviewer)

Read reviewer.md beside this file and adopt it as your mandate, along with every catalog it names. Then review the diff yourself, adversarially, over the whole of it however large it is.

Do not spawn a reviewer subagent. One was spawned here until it was measured: handed the diff and the mandate the caller already held, it read both a second time and reported back what the caller could already see. Across three paired runs that boundary cost 31% to 59% of the wall clock and about half the tokens, for no gain in what was found. The reasoning is in docs/decisions/review-pipeline-cost.md.

Splitting the diff across concurrent reviewers was tried and reverted separately, on arithmetic recorded in the same file. Split the audit before the review if either is ever worth splitting.

What the mandate needs from you, whether you hold it or hand it on:

• The diff. Take the path when the invocation names one and read it once; a pasted diff is the whole thing typed again, and what a caller writes is the slowest part of a review.

• The list of changed files, and the PR title and body when reviewing a PR.

• The catalogs and policies it names, at these paths:

  review_instructions: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/resources/review-instructions.md
  format_policy: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/resources/format-policy.md
  

• repo_conventions, forwarded verbatim when the invocation carries it — a directory of the reviewed repository's own convention files, taken from a trusted ref by the caller. Never synthesise this path. One pointing into the tree under review would let the reviewed change set the terms of its own review, and nothing in the file itself distinguishes a repository's conventions from a pull request's instructions to its reviewer. No field, no conventions.

• The tooling and shell constraints the invocation carries. You cannot run this repository's tooling — no test runner, build, compile, lint, formatter or package manager — and a catalog naming go test or node --test describes what to look for, never something to run. One measured review spent nine of ten denied calls on a test runner. Every Bash call is a single plain command, since the allowlist matches the start of the command, so a loop, pipeline, && chain, redirection or git -C <path> matches nothing.

Produce prioritized findings, each with a severity, a tag and a relative_file_path:line location, and a one-line verdict.

3. Findings audit (spawn findings-auditor — skip only if --no-audit)

The reviewer produces findings; it does not prove them. Spawn a second Agent to red-team them before the user sees them. This is an independent skeptic, not another review pass — it breaks false positives, right-sizes severity, kills duplicates, and corrects hallucinated file:line locations.

Spawn protocol:

1. Try subagent_type: "kreview:findings-auditor".
2. On unknown subagent type, retry with subagent_type: "general-purpose" and prepend the auditor's mandate by reading ../../agents/findings-auditor.md into the prompt.

The prompt MUST include, verbatim:

• The full set of reviewer findings (every finding with severity, tag, and file:line).

• The path of the diff file when the invocation names one, never the diff text. Pasting it means the whole diff is typed once per subagent, and what an orchestrator writes is the slowest part of a review. Paste a diff only when the invocation carried no path, which is how a human running this skill by hand usually reaches it.

• The list of changed files.

• The name of the reviewer that produced them, default-code-reviewer, whose severity rubric the auditor enforces.

• The tooling and shell constraints, verbatim when the invocation carries them. The auditor re-verifies each finding against the code, which makes it the agent most likely to reach for a test runner or a linter, and every attempt is a denied call that costs a turn. It cannot build, compile, test, lint, format or run the code, and every Bash call is a single plain command - a loop, pipeline, && chain, redirection or git -C <path> matches nothing in the allowlist.

• The instruction: "Red-team these findings. Default to skepticism. Verify every Critical and High against the actual code with Grep/Read. Return your verdict in the required output format."

The auditor returns SHIP / SHIP WITH CHANGES / HOLD, challenged findings (UPHOLD / DOWNGRADE / UPGRADE / REMOVE / REWORD), what survived scrutiny, any escaped bug, and bad locations.

4. Fold the verdict in and report

Apply the auditor's verdict before presenting anything:

• REMOVE / DOWNGRADE / UPGRADE / REWORD verdicts revise findings in place — never present a contested finding without the correction applied.
• Mark "survived scrutiny" findings as high-confidence.
• Promote any escaped bug into the report with proper severity and file:line.
• Drop or fix every bad location.
• Recompute the Critical/High counts after applying changes.
• If the verdict was HOLD, lead with it; do not present the contested finding as a blocker without its fix.
• Derive the report Verdict from the post-audit findings: any surviving Critical/High (or an auditor HOLD) → REQUEST_CHANGES; no findings and auditor SHIP → APPROVE; otherwise → APPROVE_WITH_COMMENTS.

Output

# Default Code Review: <target>

_No kreview skill matches this diff's primary language/framework — reviewed against
language-agnostic axes instead of a per-language mistake catalog._

## Summary

| Verdict | Critical/High |
| --- | --- |
| <APPROVE \| APPROVE_WITH_COMMENTS \| REQUEST_CHANGES> | <count> |

## Findings
<Findings after the audit pass, ordered by severity, in format-policy format.
Mark high-confidence findings that survived scrutiny.>

Reference

• Code reviewer mandate: reviewer.md
• Findings auditor: ../../agents/findings-auditor.md
• Output format & severities: ../../resources/format-policy.md