code-review-excellence

code-review-excellence is a skill for Claude Code from wshobson/agents. It costs 42 tokens per session (1,580 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to reviewing code changes constructively, with checks for bugs, maintainability, design, security, and coding standards. It also covers feedback, review checklists, and mentoring.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review pull requests, define team review practices, assess architecture, mentor developers, and reduce review delays.
Why use it?
It helps teams find problems early without turning reviews into personal or unnecessary arguments.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the developer-essentials plugin — 11 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to review pull requests, define team review practices, assess architecture, mentor developers, and reduce review delays.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence
About the project

Agentic Plugin Marketplace is a collection of reusable plugins, agents, skills, commands, and rules for coding-agent tools including Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI, and GitHub Copilot. It is for developers assembling agentic workflows across multiple harnesses from shared Markdown sources, and the catalogue entries are examples or subsets of those workflow components.

wshobson/agents · 41,158 stars · on GitHub · sethhobson.com

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 wshobson/agents --skill code-review-excellence
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wshobson/agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install developer-essentials, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 agent.

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 code-review-excellence

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence/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 code-review-excellence

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/code-review-excellence.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,580 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 16 Oct 2026
  • Snyk pass 16 Oct 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00042 $0.01580
Opus 5.5 $0.00017 $0.00632
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00008 $0.00316
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00158

Measured 4d ago against content hash 1e264e04e7d2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

code-review-excellence 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 4d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/developer-essentials/skills/code-review-excellence/SKILL.md · 267 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 267 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Code Review Excellence

Transform code reviews from gatekeeping to knowledge sharing through constructive feedback, systematic analysis, and collaborative improvement.

When to Use This Skill

  • Reviewing pull requests and code changes
  • Establishing code review standards for teams
  • Mentoring junior developers through reviews
  • Conducting architecture reviews
  • Creating review checklists and guidelines
  • Improving team collaboration
  • Reducing code review cycle time
  • Maintaining code quality standards

Core Principles

1. The Review Mindset

Goals of Code Review:

  • Catch bugs and edge cases
  • Ensure code maintainability
  • Share knowledge across team
  • Enforce coding standards
  • Improve design and architecture
  • Build team culture

Not the Goals:

  • Show off knowledge
  • Nitpick formatting (use linters)
  • Block progress unnecessarily
  • Rewrite to your preference

2. Effective Feedback

Good Feedback is:

  • Specific and actionable
  • Educational, not judgmental
  • Focused on the code, not the person
  • Balanced (praise good work too)
  • Prioritized (critical vs nice-to-have)
❌ Bad: "This is wrong."
✅ Good: "This could cause a race condition when multiple users
access simultaneously. Consider using a mutex here."

❌ Bad: "Why didn't you use X pattern?"
✅ Good: "Have you considered the Repository pattern? It would
make this easier to test. Here's an example: [link]"

❌ Bad: "Rename this variable."
✅ Good: "[nit] Consider `userCount` instead of `uc` for
clarity. Not blocking if you prefer to keep it."

3. Review Scope

What to Review:

  • Logic correctness and edge cases
  • Security vulnerabilities
  • Performance implications
  • Test coverage and quality
  • Error handling
  • Documentation and comments
  • API design and naming
  • Architectural fit

What Not to Review Manually:

  • Code formatting (use Prettier, Black, etc.)
  • Import organization
  • Linting violations
  • Simple typos

Review Process

Phase 1: Context Gathering (2-3 minutes)

Read the full file on GitHub · 267 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 4d ago Changed · -263 lines 1e264e04e7d2
  2. 1mo ago First seen · 530 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 014fff1c8db7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

code-review-excellence is a skill published in the GitHub repository wshobson/agents (41,158 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 1,580 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-03.

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