review-branch

Review Branch

Review and evaluate all work done on the current branch: summarize changes, assess plan compliance, and evaluate code quality on its own merits.

Options

The user may provide these options inline:

• --plan <path>: Path to a plan document to compare progress against
• --since <ref>: Use a specific tag, branch, or commit as the base reference instead of the default branch
• --brief: Output only a high-level summary without the detailed breakdown
• --no-save: Skip saving the review to docs/reviews/ (default: save after outputting)

Workflow

1. Determine the Base Reference

Identify the base to diff against:

1. If --since <ref> was specified, use that ref as the base. Verify it exists:

git rev-parse --verify <ref>

1. Otherwise, detect the repository's default branch:

gh repo view --json defaultBranchRef --jq '.defaultBranchRef.name'

If gh is not available or the command fails, fall back to a purely local query of the remote HEAD ref:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref origin/HEAD | sed 's@^origin/@@'

1. Find the merge base between the base reference and HEAD:

git merge-base < base-ref > HEAD

Use this merge base as the actual comparison point for all subsequent commands. This ensures the diff only includes changes made on this branch, not changes made on the base branch since diverging.

If HEAD equals the merge base (no commits on this branch), report that there are no changes to review and stop.

2. Gather Changes

Run these commands in parallel:

# Commit history on this branch
git log --oneline < merge-base > ..HEAD

# File-level summary (insertions, deletions, renames)
git diff --stat < merge-base > ..HEAD

# Full diff for detailed analysis
git diff < merge-base > ..HEAD

# Current branch name
git branch --show-current

# Current HEAD commit (for "Reviewed through" metadata)
git rev-parse --short HEAD

Also read the commit messages in detail to understand the intent behind each change: