Claude Code Reviewer — AI skill for Claude Code

claude-code-reviewer

An adversarial reviewer workflow for [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code) that enforces mandatory AI review.

How it works

Every time Claude Code tries to run `git commit`, a three-layer enforcement chain fires:

1. PreToolUse hook — intercepts the commit before git starts; blocks with clear instructions if no approval
2. Pre-commit shell hook — re-validates approval, enforces commit size limits, checks for secrets, runs your test suite
3. CLAUDE.md instructions — tells the AI to always spawn a reviewer and never self-approve

The reviewer agent runs your tests, checks code quality, then writes an approval file carrying a timestamp and a fingerprint of the staged git index. The hooks validate both: the approval expires after `REVIEWER_APPROVAL_TIMEOUT`, and it is invalidated immediately if anything is staged or unstaged afterwards — so an approval issued for one diff cannot authorise a different one.

Requirements

• Claude Code CLI
• Git
• Bash (macOS/Linux/WSL)
• Node.js (for the PreToolUse hook handler)
• jq (optional — enables automatic .claude/settings.json merging when the file already exists)

No npm packages. No external services.

Quick start

# In your project directory:
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jazzsequence/claude-code-reviewer/main/install.sh | bash

Or clone and run locally:

git clone https://github.com/jazzsequence/claude-code-reviewer
cd your-project
bash ../claude-code-reviewer/install.sh

The installer will ask for your test/lint/build commands, then set up everything automatically:

• Generates .reviewer-config.sh
• Installs the pre-commit hook
• Installs the PreToolUse hook handler
• Creates or merges .claude/settings.json (uses jq to merge if the file already exists)
• Prepends the reviewer workflow block to CLAUDE.md
• Prepends the reviewer agent prompt to AGENTS.md

Post-install

Test that the hook is blocking correctly:

echo