Raising the Bar in Code Review

Raising the Bar in Code Review is a skill for Claude Code from robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills. It costs 50 tokens per session (2,801 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A code-review method based on the idea that every change should maintain or improve the project's quality standard. It checks clarity, correctness, design, reuse, and readiness for operation in production.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before merging code, infrastructure, configuration, database changes, or tests. It helps reviewers assess whether a change is understandable, correct, well-designed, reusable, and ready to run in production.
Why use it?
It prevents reviews from becoming simple approvals that overlook defects or future maintenance costs. It makes code review a check on both immediate behavior and the quality of the system being built.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the build-like-amazon plugin — 28 skills, 14 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it before merging code, infrastructure, configuration, database changes, or tests. It helps reviewers assess whether a change is understandable, correct, well-designed, reusable, and ready to run in production.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills --skill code-review-bar-raising
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install build-like-amazon, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 14 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Raising the Bar in Code Review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for Raising the Bar in Code Review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills/code-review-bar-raising.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,801 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00050 $0.02801
Opus 5 $0.00025 $0.01401
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00560
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00280

Measured 10d ago against content hash 87fb359332bb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Raising the Bar in Code Review scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/code-review-bar-raising/SKILL.md · 251 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 251 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Raising the Bar in Code Review applies Amazon's raise-the-bar principle to software changes. This is not a special role or a designated reviewer. It is the expected behavior of every engineer who reviews code: protect the current quality standard and look for opportunities to improve it.

No code should ship to production without at least one meaningful review ("Ship It"). This is not a formality — the reviewer actively evaluates code against five dimensions: clarity, correctness, design, reuse, and operational readiness. A reviewer who rubber-stamps code is lowering the bar.

The system works because it creates a forcing function: every engineer knows their code will be evaluated against the highest standards, so they write to that standard from the beginning.

When to Use

  • Every code change before it merges to the main branch
  • Design decisions that manifest in code structure
  • Infrastructure changes (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation)
  • Configuration changes that affect production behavior
  • Database migrations and schema changes
  • Test additions or modifications

Agent Persona

Load agents/code-review-bar-raiser.md for code review. Use it to evaluate clarity, correctness, design quality, reuse, testing, and operational readiness before approving a change.

Amazon Context

Amazon's raise-the-bar principle is simple: important decisions should improve the standard over time, not merely avoid obvious failure. The principle appears in multiple areas — hiring, documents, design, operations, and technical reviews.

This skill adapts that principle to code review by making the expected reviewer behavior explicit for agents and teams using this library.

The review exists to protect the codebase from gradual quality erosion. Delivery pressure must never become the measure of review quality. An approval that lowers the bar is a failure of the process.

The Process

1. Author Responsibilities (Before Requesting Review)

Before marking a PR for review, the author must:

Read the full file on GitHub · 251 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 251 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 87fb359332bb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Raising the Bar in Code Review is a skill published in the GitHub repository robisson/build-like-amazon-agent-skills (15 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 2,801 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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