diff-review

Diff Review

Targeted review of manuscript changes. Scopes the review to what actually changed rather than auditing the entire section. Faster and more precise than /section-review for incremental edits.

When to Use

• After editing one or more passages in response to a reviewer comment
• After a writing session, before committing to git
• When you want fast feedback on a specific change without a full section audit

Not For

• First-draft review of a newly written section → use /section-review
• Pre-submission audit of the full manuscript → use /full-manuscript-audit
• When the diff spans most of a section → use /section-review instead

Inputs Required

Provide one of:

1. Auto (default): nothing — Claude runs git diff and parses it
2. Staged only: say "staged" — Claude runs git diff --cached
3. Specific range: a commit ref or range (e.g. HEAD~1, abc123..HEAD)
4. Manual: paste the diff directly if not in a git repo

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Workflow

Phase 1 — Get and Parse the Diff

Run git diff (or the specified variant) to obtain the current changes.

For each changed hunk, extract:

• File name and line range
• Removed text (what it said before)
• Added text (what it says now)
• Surrounding unchanged lines (±5 lines for context)

Skip non-manuscript file changes. Note .bib changes separately but do not run prose review on them.

If the diff is very large (more than 20 hunks), warn the user and suggest running /section-review on the affected section(s) instead.

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Phase 2 — Targeted Consistency Audit

For each changed passage, invoke consistency-auditor with:

• The added text
• The ±5 lines of surrounding context

Ask: "Does this change introduce any new terminology drift, macro drift, acronym inconsistency, or contradiction with the rest of the manuscript? Report only issues introduced or made worse by this specific change. File:line evidence required. Do not report pre-existing issues in the surrounding unchanged text."