Afk claude review

afk-claude-review

An independent second-opinion review by Claude, used as an external gate after afk-internal-review. Interchangeable with afk-codex-review, afk-kimi-review and afk-glm-review: run the number of gates required by .afk/config.md, and never use a gate whose model matches the implementer's.

This gate exists for the case where Claude is not the implementer — Codex, Kimi, 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 <family> — per invocation. The only source that may permit a run as well as block one.
2. implementer: in .afk/config.md — may only block. A per-repo file written once must not outrank a live per-run signal.
3. 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 <family> whenever the implementer is not the driver — most often when afk-agent-relay relayed the implementation to another model. Known families: claude, codex, kimi, glm, 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 confirmed structural findings into one fix pass, self-review, then re-run once. Defer minor items to a single final pass.

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 <pluginRoot>/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 "<helper-dir>/claude-gate.mjs" --implementer codex

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 <branch> / --commit <sha> / --uncommitted). Do not poll in a sleep loop.

Design mode (--design <path>) 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. 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: 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. Sort structural findings from minor items.
2. Verify each finding to the standard below.
3. Fix confirmed structural findings in one batch and sweep for the same pattern.
4. Self-review once.
5. Re-run the gate once if structural findings were fixed.
6. Resolve minor items in a single final pass without another gate round.

A structural finding claims both that the code is as described and that it goes wrong; reading the cited file:line settles only the first. Demonstrate the consequence before fixing, and account for every consumer of what you change that lives outside the diff — ../afk/SKILL.md ("External gate") holds both rules.

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: a round with no new structural finding and every prior structural finding closed by a recorded disposition — a driver-verified fix, a refutation, or an accepted risk.

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 …