requesting-code-review

Requesting Code Review

Dispatch an Opus subagent to review code changes. The reviewer gets precisely crafted context for evaluation — never your session's history. This keeps the reviewer focused on the work product, not your thought process, and preserves your own context for continued work.

Core principle: Review early, review often. Code review is judgment work — always run it on Opus.

When to Request Review

Mandatory:

• After each task in subagent-driven development
• After completing major feature
• Before merge to main

Optional but valuable:

• When stuck (fresh perspective)
• Before refactoring (baseline check)
• After fixing complex bug

How to Request

1. Get git SHAs:

BASE_SHA=<the SHA you recorded before the task started>  # or: $(git merge-base origin/main HEAD)
HEAD_SHA=$(git rev-parse HEAD)

Never HEAD~1 as BASE for multi-commit work — it silently drops all but the last commit of a multi-commit task. If you did not record the task's starting SHA, use the merge-base with the mainline, not a fixed number of parents.

Optionally, pre-build a review package so the reviewer reads one file instead of re-running git. Resolve the script the same way codex-invocation resolves $DISPATCH:

PKG="$(command -v review-package || true)"
[ -z "$PKG" ] && PKG="$(ls -1d ~/.claude/plugins/cache/strigov-cc-plugins/superpowers-strigov-ver/*/bin/review-package 2>/dev/null | sort -rV | head -1)"
[ -z "$PKG" ] && PKG="$(pwd)/bin/review-package"
"$PKG" "$BASE_SHA" "$HEAD_SHA"   # prints: wrote <path>: N commit(s), M bytes

Pass the printed path as {DIFF_FILE}. Only the wrote ... line enters your context — never read the package yourself.

2. Dispatch Opus subagent:

Read the template at ./code-reviewer.md, fill the placeholders, then dispatch:

Agent(
  subagent_type="general-purpose",
  model="opus",
  description="Code review: <short scope>",
  prompt=<filled template>
)

Placeholders:

• {WHAT_WAS_IMPLEMENTED} - What you just built
• {PLAN_OR_REQUIREMENTS} - What it should do
• {BASE_SHA} - Starting commit
• {HEAD_SHA} - Ending commit
• {DIFF_FILE} - Review package path printed by review-package (optional; fill with none if you didn't build one — the reviewer then fetches the diff itself)
• {DESCRIPTION} - Brief summary