Give reviews that help the author ship safely and quickly.
Quick Start
- Understand intent: what’s the user-facing / system-facing change and why?
- Review in this order:
- Correctness (edge cases, invariants, error handling)
- Safety (security + data handling + secrets)
- Maintainability (structure, naming, interfaces)
- Performance (hot paths, I/O, allocations, DB queries)
- Tests (do they fail before the fix? do they cover the right behavior?)
- Leave comments that are:
- Actionable (what to change) + why (risk/benefit) + scope (must vs nice-to-have)
Large diff triage (use when the change is big)
- Start with the entrypoints and high-risk files (auth, payments, data writes).
- Identify invariants the change must preserve, then hunt for violations.
- Skim for mechanical changes and collapse them; focus deep review on behavioral deltas.
When to request changes
- Bugs or correctness issues that can ship user-impacting failures.
- Security/privacy regressions or data handling gaps.
- Missing or inadequate tests for new behavior or fixed bugs.
Output format (recommended)
- Summary: what the change does
- Major issues: must-fix items (blockers)
- Minor suggestions: improvements / nits
- Test plan: how to validate locally/CI
- Follow-ups: tickets/cleanup that shouldn’t block merge
Optional tool: generate a review report from git diff
From the repo you’re reviewing:
python ~/.codex/skills/code-reviewer/scripts/review_diff.py --base origin/main --out /tmp/review.md
References
- Review checklist and comment style:
references/review-checklist.md