Skip to content
agent-ready-repo

Review a branch or PR you didn't write

Run an independent, severity-ranked review of another author’s change and return actionable findings.

Use this when: You need to run an adversarial (and specialist) review on a branch or PR you did not write. Prerequisites: The core pack installed and your agent able to reach the branch or PR (local branch, GitHub PR via gh, or a GitLab MR). Result: Severity-tagged review findings (Blockers / Concerns / Nits) ready to hand back to the author.

The reviewer subagents don’t care who wrote the diff. The work loop points them at your own working tree, but you can point them at anyone’s.

Use the work-loop to review branch feature/payment-refund.

Prompt your agent:

Use the work-loop to review branch <their-branch>.

Name whatever your agent can reach. A local branch always works; if the agent has the tooling (gh, glab, an MCP server), point it straight at a hosted change instead — “review GitHub PR #123”, “review this GitLab MR”.

It resolves the diff and runs adversarial-reviewer (plus security-reviewer / quality-engineer if the diff warrants) — the same REVIEW step described in Plan and execute non-trivial work.

shaping-reviewer checks a draft intent, brief, or spec before construction; it is separate from the adversarial, security, and quality code-review lenses — which own disjoint concerns and do not restate each other’s findings — and is not a PR-diff reviewer.

Two things worth saying out loud:

  • No spec? Say so. An in-flight branch usually has no spec, so the reviewer falls back to the spec-less self-review lens. If the branch does carry a docs/specs/<feature>/spec.md, name it — the reviewer then checks the diff against the spec instead.
  • It’s a throwaway review. You want the findings, not a loop run. Don’t expect state.json or stasis detection; read the severity-tagged output and hand it to the author.

What you have now

Section titled “What you have now”

You have severity-ranked findings for the author, evaluated against the named spec when one exists. Hand the findings back for repair; this review does not start or advance an implementation loop.

See also

Section titled “See also”
  • The core pack — why the reviewers read the diff cold, and what each lens covers.