Claude Team Review

Adversarial code and plan review through a peer-reviewer subagent.

One subagent reviews. The lead evaluates findings, fixes what holds up, pushes back on what doesn't, and asks for re-review. Up to 5 rounds.

Designed for Claude Code and Codex. The skill is platform-agnostic in its instructions, so it can potentially work on other hosts that support subagents — but Claude Code and Codex are the verified targets.

What is this

A skill that spawns an adversarial reviewer as a subagent on the host of your choice. The reviewer reads your project, runs tests, checks documentation, and delivers findings with a skeptical stance.

The lead (your main session) does not blindly apply findings. It builds an evaluation matrix, verifies the technical claims, and replies with applied / re-scoped / rejected-with-reasoning sections. The reviewer gets a chance to contest the rejections in the next round.

How it differs from adversarial-review

adversarial-review uses two different models (Claude writes, Codex reviews) — you get cross-model blind-spot coverage and cheap re-review via codex exec resume. It requires Codex CLI and an OpenAI API key.

claude-team-review stays inside whichever host you're using. No external dependencies. The reviewer is a subagent with its own context window, MCP access, and the ability to run commands. For re-review, the lead tries continuation when the host supports it (e.g. Claude Code Agent Teams), and otherwise spawns a fresh subagent with the previous- rounds context block.

Use adversarial-review when you want maximum review quality through model diversity. Use claude-team-review when you want zero external dependencies and a richer reviewer (tests, docs, web search) running on the same host as the lead.

How it works

┌──────────┐     spawn        ┌────────────┐
│   Lead   │ ───────────────> │  Reviewer  │
│  (code)  │                  │ (subagent) │
└──────────┘                  └────────────┘
     ^                              │
     │          findings            │
     │ <────────────────────────────┘
     │
     │  evaluate (matrix, verify)
     │  apply / re-scope / reject
     v
┌──────────┐     re-review    ┌────────────┐
│   Lead   │ ───────────────> │  Reviewer  │
│  (fixed) │   "applied A,    │(same / new)│
│          │    rejected B    └────────────┘
│          │    with reason"        │
└──────────┘                        │
                              VERDICT: APPROVED

The lead tries to continue the same reviewer for re-review when the host supports it (cheaper — context is preserved). Codex supports intra-session continuation natively; Claude Code requires Agent Teams (CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1) for the SendMessage-based continuation path. When continuation is unavailable, or when the previous reviewer is no longer reachable, the lead asks the operator before spawning a fresh subagent — full project re-read is expensive, and the operator may prefer to conclude the review unverified. Headless runs without operator access conclude unverified.

Three modes

Mode	What it reviews	When to use
plan	Implementation plan	Before writing code
code	Working-tree, staged, and branch changes	After writing code
code-vs-plan	Code changes against the plan	Verify implementation

Mode is auto-detected from context, or you can force it with an argument.

For code mode, "branch changes" means commits on the current branch since it diverged from its base (main, master, or the remote default). The three scopes (unstaged, staged, branch-vs-base) are reviewed as a union, not a fallback chain — so the typical PR case (committed changes on the branch plus an in-progress local tweak) is covered without an explicit flag.

Language

The skill detects the operator's session language from recent conversation and instructs the reviewer to respond in it. No flag, no configuration. If you write to Claude in Russian, the reviewer's findings come back in Russian.

What the reviewer can do

• Read any file in the repository
• Run commands — tests, linters, type checkers, build scripts
• Search the web and query documentation via MCP (Context7)
• Inspect git history — blame, log, diff

The reviewer must not create, edit, or delete project files. The briefing forbids it — that's the primary control on both hosts and the default the skill ships with. The reason for keeping it briefing-only is that the reviewer also needs to run things (tests, linters, git, MCP queries) to verify findings — hard sandboxes that block writes tend to block exec too, which would gut the reviewer.

If you accept that trade-off and want enforced no-write on top, both hosts have an option:

• Claude Code: define a custom subagent (e.g. ~/.claude/agents/adversarial-reviewer.md) with disallowedTools: Write, Edit and dispatch that agent type. The built-in general-purpose agent has no invocation-time tool-restriction knob, so this path requires the custom definition.
• Codex: sandbox_mode = "read-only" applies natively, but it also disables shell exec for the subagent — the reviewer will not be able to run tests or commands. Use only when you specifically want a read-only audit and are willing to give up empirical verification.

What the lead does (and does NOT do)

Does: evaluates each finding through a verification matrix, classifies by type (architectural / tool-mechanic / style / security), verifies its own technical claims before publishing them, replies in a structured applied/re-scoped/rejected-with-reasoning format.

Does NOT: apply findings blindly, trust cited upstream issues by number, make confident tool-mechanic claims without empirical testing, stay silent about rejections.

Pauses the operator only on structural fixes — changes to the invocation grammar, output contract, workflow states, or the meaning of public options. Wording and factual fixes apply silently; the operator sees the full breakdown in the round summary. One pause per round at most, never one per finding.

The skill explicitly invokes superpowers:receiving-code-review for the evaluation step (and inlines its key principles for portability).

Requirements

• A host that supports subagents — Claude Code or Codex
• Optional: Claude Code with Agent Teams enabled, for cheaper re-review via continuation

No external API keys.

Installation

Claude Code

git clone https://github.com/dementev-dev/claude-team-review.git
cd claude-team-review

# Symlink the skill into the personal skills directory
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -s "$(pwd)" ~/.claude/skills/claude-team-review

Claude Code watches ~/.claude/skills/ for changes and will pick the skill up without a restart.

Recommended — enable Agent Teams for cheaper re-review. Continuation across rounds uses SendMessage, which is gated on Agent Teams. Add to your Claude Code settings:

{
  "env": {
    "CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS": "1"
  }
}

Without Agent Teams, the Task-tool spawn is one-shot — every Round 2+ re-review goes through the operator-gated fresh-spawn path (the operator decides between spawning a fresh subagent that re-reads the project, or concluding the review unverified). Headless runs without an operator conclude as NOT VERIFIED.

Codex

git clone https://github.com/dementev-dev/claude-team-review.git
cd claude-team-review

# Place the skill in the standard Codex skills directory
mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills
ln -s "$(pwd)" ~/.codex/skills/claude-team-review

Codex supports intra-session continuation natively — the lead addresses the running subagent thread by name in its next instruction and Codex's orchestration routes the message there. The skill uses this for cheap re-review. (As an operator, you can use the /agent CLI command to inspect or switch between active threads — it's a terminal tool, not something the lead invokes.) When the previous subagent thread is no longer active, Round 2+ goes through the operator-gated fresh-spawn path (operator decides: spawn fresh with a full project re-read, or conclude unverified).

Usage

# Auto-detect what to review (from git state + conversation context)
/claude-team-review

# Force a specific mode
/claude-team-review plan
/claude-team-review code
/claude-team-review code-vs-plan                    # uses the plan most recently shown in the conversation
/claude-team-review code-vs-plan path/to/plan.md    # explicit plan file

# A bare file path is treated as a plan to review
/claude-team-review path/to/plan.md

# xhigh is an effort flag, orthogonal to mode — combine with any of the above
/claude-team-review xhigh
/claude-team-review plan xhigh
/claude-team-review code-vs-plan path/to/plan.md xhigh

Files in this skill

• SKILL.md — workflow and rules
• reviewer-prompt.md — briefing template with placeholders (filled and passed as the subagent's prompt at spawn time)
• README.md — this file
• EXPERIMENT.md — comparative experiment notes (Opus vs GPT reviewer)

Reviewer behavior

The reviewer uses an adversarial stance — it defaults to skepticism and tries to break confidence in the change. Each finding must answer:

1. What can go wrong? — concrete scenario
2. Why vulnerable? — cite specific location
3. Impact — what breaks and how badly
4. Recommendation — specific fix

The reviewer verifies findings by running tests, checking documentation, and inspecting related code before reporting.

Roadmap

• Real-world testing of the cross-platform spawn path on Codex
• Parallel multi-reviewer mode (security + performance + correctness) — Codex has a native pattern for this; the skill is ready to adopt
• Persistent reviewer memory across sessions
• Integration with CI (GitHub Actions)
• Comparison benchmarks: Codex backend vs Team backend

Experiment: comparing reviewers

We ran both reviewers (Opus and GPT-5.4) on the same plan and compared their findings. The key takeaway: the two models review from fundamentally different paradigms — Opus as an architect ("will this design work?"), Codex as a security/ops engineer ("what will break in production?"). Zero complete overlaps, roughly 30% partial overlaps.

Details (in Russian): EXPERIMENT.md — full experiment write-up, all findings, overlap analysis, conclusions.

Related

• adversarial-review — cross-model variant using Codex CLI as the reviewer backend
• Claude Code Agent Teams docs — official documentation on Agent Teams
• Codex Subagents docs — official documentation on Codex subagents

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.