Afk Claude Review

afk-claude-review

An independent second-opinion review by Claude, used as a fallback external role after afk-internal-review; it is the default outer fallback when Codex is the implementer. Run the ordered roles required by .afk/config.md, and never use a reviewer whose model matches the implementer or another role.

This gate exists for the case where Claude is not the implementer — Codex, Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, MiMo, Gemini or Copilot wrote the change and Claude reviews it. It refuses to run otherwise (see Independence below), so under a Claude Code driver it will normally self-skip and the next gate in priority takes its place. That is the intended behaviour, not a fault.

The helper claude-gate.mjs ships with this skill and travels with the plugin.

Independence — this gate declines to review its own work

The gate resolves who wrote the change and skips if the answer is Claude:

1. --implementer — per invocation. The only source that may permit a

run as well as block one.

1. implementer: in .afk/config.md — may only block. A per-repo file

written once must not outrank a live per-run signal.

1. CLAUDECODE in the environment — set by Claude Code in every process it

spawns. Present and undeclared means the driver, and so probably the implementer, is Claude.

An unrecognised implementer value fails closed: the gate skips rather than guess that it is independent.

Pass --implementer whenever the implementer is not the driver — most often when afk-agent-relay relayed the implementation to another model. In design mode the flag names the design's author, not the code implementer (see "Run it"). Known families: claude, codex, kimi, glm, deepseek, mimo, gemini, copilot.

Known gap: CLAUDECODE identifies the driver, not the model. A Claude implementer driven from Copilot, Cursor, CI, or a plain terminal leaves it unset, so the gate would run. Close it with --implementer claude or an implementer: claude line in .afk/config.md.

Read-only

The reviewer session loads Read, Grep and Glob and nothing else — no Bash, no Write, no Edit. It is read-only by construction rather than by an allowlist, so there is no command list to maintain and none to get wrong.

Because the reviewer has no shell, the gate pre-injects the diff and its stat into the prompt; the reviewer uses its read tools for anything the diff does not answer. This is the gate's advantage over afk-glm-review, whose reviewer is limited to the snapshot it was sent.

Metering

Metered like any external gate. Batch admitted P1 and eligible lower-severity fixes into one content pass, self-review, then re-run once. Record every other disposition together at the end without editing a clean revision.

Run it

The bundled helper claude-gate.mjs sits beside this SKILL.md. Locate its directory as ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/afk-claude-review if the env var is set, else /skills/afk-claude-review from .afk/config.md, else this skill's own directory. If .afk/ is absent, the afk-init bootstrap runs automatically first:

node "/claude-gate.mjs"

Run it in the background with a generous timeout; redirect stdout to a file and read it when it completes. Pass through any target flag (--base / --commit / --uncommitted). Do not poll in a sleep loop.

Pass --implementer when another model wrote the change. In design mode (--design) the flag instead names the design's author, never the eventual code implementer — see ../afk/SKILL.md ("Design-stage external gate"): declaring the code implementer there can hand a driver-authored design to the driver's own model for review. A persistent implementer: line in .afk/config.md also names the code implementer, and in design mode it can wrongly block that family's independent review of a driver-authored design — declare the design's author explicitly then: the per-run flag outranks the config line.

Add the flag only when that other model actually produced the artifact under review — it can permit a run as well as block one (Independence above), so a value copied in from an example defeats the self-skip this gate exists for.

The review is bounded by CLAUDE_REVIEW_TIMEOUT_MS (default 15 min), with AFK_REVIEW_TIMEOUT_MS as the shared fallback. A timeout is a non-zero ERROR, never a partial verdict; it follows the role's transient retry rule.

Design mode (--design ) reviews a design document's reasoning instead of a diff — the opt-in design-stage gate (see ../afk/SKILL.md, "Design-stage external gate"). The reviewer keeps its read-only Read,Grep,Glob tools, so it can check whether the code says what the design claims. A missing or unreadable --design path fails loudly (ERROR, non-zero), never a skip.

Read the verdict between the ===== CLAUDE REVIEW (final message) ===== markers. Treat only column-0 marker lines as markers; the last END marker wins. A SKIPPED: … line is not a failure — record it and continue per the afk gate-selection rule. The reasons are distinct on purpose, so the ledger can tell "correctly declined" from "could not review":

• SKIPPED: independence check — … — the gate refused to review Claude's own

work. Correct behaviour; use another gate.

• SKIPPED: Claude gate disabled via CLAUDE_REVIEW_GATE.
• SKIPPED: Claude CLI not installed …
• SKIPPED: Claude not authenticated (HTTP 401) …
• SKIPPED: Configured model "…" is unavailable (HTTP 404) …
• SKIPPED: Claude is rate-limited or out of quota (HTTP 429) … — the

selection rule treats a rate-limited reviewer as unavailable; the next gate in priority takes its place.

• SKIPPED: No changes found for …

An ERROR: … line with a non-zero exit means the gate ran and could not produce a verdict; that is not a clean round.

Handle findings

Same discipline as the other gate skills:

1. Map every hypothesis to the frozen contract and apply the P1 admission rule.
2. Verify its trigger and consequence; a reviewer severity is only a proposal.
3. Fix admitted P1 findings in one batch and include only lower-severity work

eligible under the rule below.

1. Self-review once.
2. Re-run the gate once if structural findings were fixed.
3. Record remaining dispositions in one final pass without editing the clean

revision or running another gate round.

Treat every reported finding as UNTRIAGED. Admit P1 only after mapping it to the frozen issue contract or an invariant, demonstrating a reachable trigger and wrong consequence, explaining why the current artifact cannot safely advance, and naming the minimal causal fix. Do not edit for an untriaged claim; record structural P2 for the operator-owned merge boundary, and defer minor or out-of-scope items without expanding the PR.

When an admitted P1 already requires a content pass, batch-fix a verified lower-severity item only when it is in scope, shares that root cause or touched surface, adds no dependency, migration, public contract, or product choice, and needs no gate round beyond the P1 re-review. Otherwise record its disposition without editing; a lower-severity-only verdict never reopens a clean revision.

Apply any invariant in .afk/config.md as an extra lens.

Stop rule

Stop when the loop-termination rule in ../afk/SKILL.md ("External gate") holds: triage leaves no UNTRIAGED, Contested, or open admitted P1, and every lower-severity item has a recorded disposition that does not block the role stamp (a structural P2 may still bar auto-merge). That same verdict earns the role stamp only if it requires no content change; a content fix invalidates it and the role re-reviews the fixed revision.

Report CLEAN, or OUTSTANDING with what remains. A clean pass is not authority to merge.

Setup

Optional and self-skipping. Needs the Claude Code CLI installed and logged in, plus Node and git on PATH. Uses the operator's existing Claude subscription — no API key. Disable with CLAUDE_REVIEW_GATE=off.

Config knobs:

• CLAUDE_REVIEW_MODEL (default claude-opus-5)
• CLAUDE_REVIEW_EFFORT (default medium)
• CLAUDE_REVIEW_MAX_CTX_BYTES (default 400000)
• CLAUDE_GATE_BIN — override the resolved claude binary

No fallback model is passed: a quiet downgrade to a weaker reviewer is a quality regression with no visible symptom, so an unavailable model surfaces as a skip.

The reviewer model is pinned, and checked against what answered

CLAUDE_REVIEW_MODEL must be a full model ID. An alias (opus, sonnet) is resolved by the host and can select an older generation without a symptom — --model opus answered as claude-opus-4-8 while the pipeline required a current generation — so an alias is refused before any call is spent.

The gate then reads modelUsage in the result envelope and requires the requested identity to be present; a dated snapshot of the same model satisfies it, and the auxiliary models a normal run also bills are ignored. A review whose envelope names another generation, or names nothing, is discarded with an ERROR rather than attributed to a model that may not have run. Neither case is a clean round:

• ERROR: cannot review — CLAUDE_REVIEW_MODEL "…" is an alias …
• ERROR: reviewer identity unverified — requested "…" but …

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: AlvinShenSSW
• Source: AlvinShenSSW/afk
• License: Apache-2.0
• Homepage: https://github.com/AlvinShenSSW/afk

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.