dotfiles/.claude/skills/review-uncommitted/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
review-uncommitted	Review the working tree's uncommitted changes along three axes — change risk, repo standards, and spec fidelity — using parallel sub-agents.

Three-axis review of the diff between HEAD and the working tree:

• Risk — how much attention does this change warrant, from low to high?
• Standards — does the code conform to this repo's documented coding standards?
• Spec — does the code faithfully implement the originating PRD or task file?

All three axes run as parallel sub-agents so they don't pollute each other's context, then this skill aggregates their findings.

Process

1. Capture the diff

The diff command is git diff HEAD — everything uncommitted, staged or not. New files must already be tracked (git added) to show up; this skill doesn't scan for untracked files, so that's the caller's responsibility.

Confirm the diff is non-empty before going further. An empty diff should fail here — not inside three parallel sub-agents.

2. Identify the spec source

Look for the originating spec, in this order:

1. A path the user passed as an argument.
2. A spec file matching the branch name or feature — .claude/spec/<feature-slug>.md.
3. If nothing is found, ask the user where the spec is. If they say there isn't one, the Spec sub-agent will skip and report "no spec available".

3. Identify the standards sources

Anything in the repo that documents how code should be written, such as CODING_STANDARDS.md or CONTRIBUTING.md.

On top of whatever the repo documents, the Standards axis always carries the smell baseline below — a fixed set of Fowler code smells (Refactoring, ch.3) that applies even when a repo documents nothing. Two rules bind it:

• The repo overrides. A documented repo standard always wins; where it endorses something the baseline would flag, suppress the smell.
• Always a judgement call. Each smell is a labelled heuristic ("possible Feature Envy"), never a hard violation — and, like any standard here, skip anything tooling already enforces.

Each smell reads what it is → how to fix; match it against the diff:

• Mysterious Name — a function, variable, or type whose name doesn't reveal what it does or holds. → rename it; if no honest name comes, the design's murky.
• Duplicated Code — the same logic shape appears in more than one hunk or file in the change. → extract the shared shape, call it from both.
• Feature Envy — a method that reaches into another object's data more than its own. → move the method onto the data it envies.
• Data Clumps — the same few fields or params keep travelling together (a type wanting to be born). → bundle them into one type, pass that.
• Primitive Obsession — a primitive or string standing in for a domain concept that deserves its own type. → give the concept its own small type.
• Repeated Switches — the same switch/if-cascade on the same type recurs across the change. → replace with polymorphism, or one map both sites share.
• Shotgun Surgery — one logical change forces scattered edits across many files in the diff. → gather what changes together into one module.
• Divergent Change — one file or module is edited for several unrelated reasons. → split so each module changes for one reason.
• Speculative Generality — abstraction, parameters, or hooks added for needs the spec doesn't have. → delete it; inline back until a real need shows.
• Message Chains — long a.b().c().d() navigation the caller shouldn't depend on. → hide the walk behind one method on the first object.
• Middle Man — a class or function that mostly just delegates onward. → cut it, call the real target direct.
• Refused Bequest — a subclass or implementer that ignores or overrides most of what it inherits. → drop the inheritance, use composition.

4. Risk rubric

The Risk axis judges the diff alone — no repo-doc lookup, no input from the Standards or Spec sub-agents. It always runs; it only needs the diff from step 1.

Rate each of these six factors Low / Medium / High, then take the single highest-rated factor as the overall rating (worst-factor-wins):

• Blast radius — isolated change vs. ripples across many files, modules, or callers.
• Reversibility — trivial rollback vs. hard to undo (migrations, deletions, published API/schema changes).
• Test coverage — covered by tests in/around the diff vs. untested.
• Sensitive domain — touches auth, security, payments, permissions, concurrency, or data migrations.
• Size & complexity — large diff or tangled control flow vs. small/simple.
• Runtime criticality — hot path/production-critical vs. internal or dev-only tooling.

5. Spawn all three sub-agents in parallel

Send a single message with three Agent tool calls. Use the general-purpose subagent for all three.

Risk sub-agent prompt — include:

• The full diff (output of git diff HEAD).
• The six risk factors from step 4, pasted in full.
• The brief: "Rate each of the six factors Low/Medium/High with a one-clause reason, then give the overall rating as the highest of the six. Report the overall rating first, then the six factor lines. Under 200 words."

Standards sub-agent prompt — include:

• The full diff (output of git diff HEAD).
• The list of standards-source files you found in step 3, plus the smell baseline from step 3 pasted in full — the sub-agent has no other access to it.
• The brief: "Report — per file/hunk where relevant — (a) every place the diff violates a documented standard: cite the standard (file + the rule); and (b) any baseline smell you spot: name it and quote the hunk. Distinguish hard violations from judgement calls — documented-standard breaches can be hard, but baseline smells are always judgement calls, and a documented repo standard overrides the baseline. Skip anything tooling enforces. Under 400 words."

Spec sub-agent prompt — include:

• The full diff (output of git diff HEAD).
• The path or fetched contents of the spec.
• The brief: "Report: (a) requirements the spec asked for that are missing or partial; (b) behaviour in the diff that wasn't asked for (scope creep); (c) requirements that look implemented but where the implementation looks wrong. Quote the spec line for each finding. Under 400 words."

If the spec is missing, skip the Spec sub-agent and note this in the final report.

6. Aggregate

Present the Risk report first, under a ## Risk heading, with the overall rating bolded on its own line followed by the six factor lines:

## Risk
**Overall: HIGH**
- Blast radius: ...
- Reversibility: ...
- Test coverage: ...
- Sensitive domain: ...
- Size & complexity: ...
- Runtime criticality: ...

Then present the Standards and Spec reports under ## Standards and ## Spec headings, verbatim or lightly cleaned. Do not merge or rerank findings — the axes are deliberately separate (see Why Standards and Spec stay separate).

End with a one-line summary: total findings per axis (Standards/Spec only), and the worst issue within each axis (if any). Don't pick a single winner across axes — that's the reranking the separation exists to prevent. The risk rating isn't repeated here; it already leads the report.

Why Standards and Spec stay separate

A change can pass one axis and fail the other:

• Code that follows every standard but implements the wrong thing → Standards pass, Spec fail.
• Code that does exactly what the PRD or task asked but breaks the project's conventions → Spec pass, Standards fail.

Reporting them separately stops one axis from masking the other.