review

Review with Pharaoh

The definitive code review, for any codebase. Architecture-aware, branch-aware, multi-agent, adversarial. Five phases that combine Pharaoh's knowledge graph with parallel specialized reviewers and an independent second opinion from a different model. Every phase works without Pharaoh too; Pharaoh makes the architecture picture exact and cheap where it maps the repo.

A review always reaches a verdict. When a phase needs something your client doesn't have (Pharaoh, a shell, subagents, a second model), it says how to carry on without it: do that, and name what was missing in the review output. Ask the user only when someone is there to answer.

Final verdict: SHIP / SHIP WITH CHANGES / BLOCK

When to Use

Before merging any branch. Before opening any PR. When reviewing changes that touch shared modules, export new functions, modify core data flows, or claim to implement a spec.

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Phase 0 — Git Context

Goal: Know exactly what changed and where you are. This phase is mandatory and runs before anything else.

No shell, or no git? Review the diff you were given (a file, a pasted patch, a pull request's changes): take the changed files and touched modules from it, skip to step 5, and say in the review output that branch context wasn't available.

1. Detect the current environment:

   git rev-parse --show-toplevel          # repo root (may be a worktree)
   git worktree list                      # detect if running in a worktree
   git branch --show-current              # current branch name
   git log --oneline -1                   # latest commit
   

2. Determine the base (where this branch diverged from the branch it merges into). The target is the first of these that resolves:

   TARGET=$(gh pr view --json baseRefName --jq '"origin/" + .baseRefName' 2>/dev/null)   # the open PR's target branch
   [ -n "$TARGET" ] || TARGET=$(git symbolic-ref -q --short refs/remotes/origin/HEAD)    # the default branch, set by git clone
   [ -n "$TARGET" ] || for b in origin/main origin/master main master; do
     git rev-parse -q --verify "$b" >/dev/null && TARGET=$b && break
   done
   BASE=$(git merge-base HEAD "$TARGET") && echo "base: $BASE"
   

   If no base comes out, ask which branch this merges into (with no one to ask, review the uncommitted changes from step 4 and say the base was unknown). An empty base makes every diff below come out empty, and the review would report no changes. If your shell doesn't keep variables between commands, set BASE to the printed commit at the start of each one.