Review Delta

Review Delta

Perform a focused, token-efficient code review of uncommitted changes and their blast radius. Use this for quick local reviews BEFORE committing. For full branch/PR reviews, use review-pr instead.

Command surface: run the local CLI through the coding harness shell. Examples use the installed better-code-review-graph command; from a source checkout, prefix it with uv run. No MCP mapping is required. Use better-code-review-graph review --help for the command reference.

Steps

1. Ensure the graph is current with better-code-review-graph graph build --base HEAD --repo-root "<path>".

2. Get review context with better-code-review-graph review context --base HEAD --repo-root "<path>". This returns:

   • Changed files (auto-detected from git diff)
   • Impacted nodes and files (blast radius)
   • Source code snippets for changed areas
   • Review guidance (test coverage gaps, wide impact warnings, inheritance concerns)

3. Analyze the blast radius by reviewing the impacted_nodes and impacted_files in the JSON result. Focus on:

   • Functions whose callers changed (may need signature/behavior verification)
   • Classes with inheritance changes (Liskov substitution concerns)
   • Files with many dependents (high-risk changes)

4. Perform the review using the context. For each changed file:

   • Review the source snippet for correctness, style, and potential bugs
   • Check if impacted callers/dependents need updates
   • Verify test coverage with better-code-review-graph query query --pattern tests_for --target "<function>" --repo-root "<path>"
   • Flag any untested changed functions

5. Report findings in a structured format:

   ## Delta Review
   
   ### Summary
   <One-line overview of the changes>
   
   ### Risk Level
   - **Low**: Test-only changes, documentation, config files
   - **Medium**: Implementation changes with <5 impacted files, no public API changes
   - **High**: >5 impacted files OR public API signature/behavior change
   
   ### Issues Found
   - <Bugs, style issues, missing tests>
   
   ### Blast Radius
   - <List of impacted files/functions>
   
   ### Recommendations
   1. <Actionable suggestion>
   

Risk Level Escalation Rules

• High if any of: >5 impacted files, public API signature change, public API behavior change, breaking change in exported symbols
• Low if all of: only test files changed, only documentation/comments changed, only config/CI files changed
• Medium: everything else

Advantages Over Full-Repo Review

• Only sends changed + impacted code to the model (5-10x fewer tokens)
• Automatically identifies blast radius without manual file searching
• Provides structural context (who calls what, inheritance chains)
• Flags untested functions automatically