Code Review

Reviews pull request diffs for correctness, security, maintainability, and test coverage. Use when the user asks for a code review of a change set, patch, or PR description.

Sby Skills Guide Bot
DevelopmentIntermediate
007/22/2026
Claude CodeCursorWindsurfCopilotCodex
#code-review#pull-request#security-review#testing#maintainability

Recommended for


name: code-review description: Reviews pull request diffs for correctness, security, maintainability, and test coverage. Use when the user asks for a code review of a change set, patch, or PR description.

Code Review

Instructions

When reviewing a diff/PR, follow this flow:

  1. Clarify context (if missing)

    • Ask for the repo name, language/framework, and what “done” means (e.g., “ready to merge” vs “early review”).
    • If the user did not provide a diff, ask them to paste the relevant patch or describe the files/behavior changed.
  2. Summarize the change

    • Provide a 2–5 sentence summary of what changed and the most important impact.
  3. Identify issues with severity

    • Report issues in this order: Critical, Suggestion, Nice-to-have.
    • For each issue, include: severity, area (correctness/security/performance/maintainability/tests/style), location (file path and the changed symbol/section when possible), and why it matters.
    • Prefer specific, actionable fixes over general guidance.
  4. Security review

    • Check for common risks relevant to the language/framework: injection (SQL/NoSQL/command), XSS/CSRF, authz/authn mistakes, unsafe deserialization, SSRF, secrets in logs, and overly-permissive CORS.
    • If user input handling exists, validate, sanitize/escape appropriately, and enforce allow-lists where possible.
  5. Correctness & robustness

    • Look for broken invariants, edge cases, race conditions, timezone/locale bugs, error handling, and inconsistent data types.
    • Verify new/modified code paths are exercised by the change.
  6. Maintainability

    • Check naming, complexity, duplication, API boundaries, and whether abstractions match existing patterns.
    • Flag “spaghetti logic” or overly broad functions/modules.
  7. Tests & quality gate

    • Identify missing/weak tests that would have caught the issues you found.
    • If the repo has test tooling detectable from the diff (e.g., jest, vitest, pytest, go test, npm test), suggest the most likely command(s) to run.
    • If you cannot infer a command reliably, list what to test instead (unit/integration/E2E) without guessing exact commands.
  8. Close-out recommendation

    • End with a short decision suggestion: “Approve”, “Request changes”, or “Needs follow-up” based on Critical items.

Output Template

Use this structure by default:

Summary
- ...

Critical
- [file/path] <what> — <why> — Fix: <specific change>

Suggestion
- [file/path] <what> — <why> — Fix: <specific change>

Nice-to-have
- [file/path] <what> — <why> — Improvement: <specific change>

Test plan (what to run / what to add)
- ...

Recommendation
- Approve / Request changes / Needs follow-up

Standards

  • If the repo contains a style guide or security guidelines (commonly docs/STYLE.md, STYLE_GUIDE.md, SECURITY.md, or CONTRIBUTING.md), align findings and fix suggestions to those documents.
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