Skip to content
cccskills
FreePublished on GitHub

rseng-code-review

Covers reviewing existing code and whole projects, not just new diffs: structured codebase audits that produce ranked findings and then implement the agreed improvements, recurring project reviews after major tasks and milestones, review scoping by risk and tier, and turning review findings into tracked work and lessons. Use PROACTIVELY after major tasks and milestones, and when the user asks for a code review, codebase audit or health check of existing code, wants improvements suggested and applied, mentions reviewing the project after a milestone or before a release or submission, or when inherited or long-unreviewed code needs a structured pass. For diff-time pre-review of new work see rseng-pair-programming; for PR-time review process and rules see rseng-version-control-review.

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24 stars(GitHub 24 + cccskills 0)

Run score Not tested

See how to install

Files included (2)

  • SKILL.md6.6 KB
  • references.md391 B

SKILL.md (original)

Review the instructions the agent will receive before you install.

Code and project review

Most review attention goes to new diffs; most risk lives in the code nobody has looked at for a year. This skill covers the retrospective forms: reviewing the EXISTING codebase with findings ranked and then implemented, and reviewing the PROJECT on a cadence - after milestones, before releases and submissions. Division of labor: rseng-pair-programming owns diff-time pre-review of new work; rseng-version-control-review owns the review process and rules; this skill owns review as an undertaking on what is already there. Review-then-implement is a two-phase contract: findings first, agreement second, changes third - never silent rewriting under the review's flag.

The codebase review

Scope before depth - review the code that matters most:

  1. Map risk: recently churned complex modules (rseng-software-metrics' hotspot map), result-bearing code paths (what feeds published numbers), security surfaces (rseng-security), and anything the tests do not reach (rseng-testing's coverage). Review THOSE deeply; skim the rest.
  2. Sweep with the pack's lenses, each producing findings with file:line evidence: correctness and silent-failure modes (rseng-defensive-coding), numerical practice (rseng-numerical-accuracy), design and coupling (rseng-software-design), performance red flags on hot paths (rseng-performance-profiling), hygiene and dead code (rseng-code-quality), reproducibility hazards - unseeded randomness, unpinned environments, hidden state (rseng-reproducibility, rseng-notebooks).
  3. Rank honestly: must-fix (wrong results possible, data loss, security), should-fix (maintenance debt with a price), and nice (style beyond the linter's remit). Tier calibrates the bar (rseng-quality-framework): analysis code is not reviewed to infrastructure standards.
  4. Deliver findings BEFORE changing anything: the ranked report with evidence is the review; the user picks what gets implemented (defaults offered: all must-fix, should-fix by effort).

Implementing the agreed improvements

  • One finding, one commit: small reviewable changes referencing the finding (rseng-version-control-review), tests first or alongside for behavior-touching fixes - and characterization tests BEFORE touching anything load-bearing and untested (rseng-legacy-code's safety net; review of legacy code IS the legacy workflow).
  • Behavior-preserving by default: refactors keep the tests green; anything that changes results is flagged loudly and decided by the human (the science is theirs - rseng-pair-programming's boundary).
  • Re-run the full verification after the batch: tests, linters, metrics delta (rseng-software-metrics shows the improvement measurably - report before/after numbers).
  • Route the residue: declined findings recorded with reasons in the decision log (rseng-project-tracking), recurring patterns into lint rules or checklists, and the transferable insights into LESSONS.md (rseng-lessons-learned).

The recurring project review

After a major task, milestone or before a release/submission, review the PROJECT, not just the code - a lightweight standing agenda:

  • Code: the codebase review above, scoped to what changed since last time plus one rotating deep-dive area.
  • Quality posture: indicator walk (rseng-quality-framework), FAIR/security assessments re-run and deltas reported (rseng-fairguard, rseng-security).
  • Records current: README and docs truthful (rseng-documentation), citation and contributor records match reality (rseng-citation-metadata), aidecl.yaml up to date (rseng-ai-declaration), tracker and milestones honest (rseng-project-tracking).
  • Reproducibility spot-check: the one-command path still works from clean (rseng-reproducibility).
  • Close the loop: findings become tracked tasks with owners; the review note (date, scope, findings, actions) goes into the project record - and the next review starts by checking the last one's actions landed.

Offer this review PROACTIVELY at natural moments - a milestone just closed, a release is near - as a short menu ("want the post-milestone review? code, records, repro - about 20 minutes"), respecting a decline (rseng-trainer's consensual-offer rule).

Review craft

The comment discipline from rseng-pair-programming applies unchanged: evidence with every claim, reasons with every request, blocking separated from preference, praise where it is earned - and for research code, "what does this number correspond to physically" remains a first-class review question (rseng-research-integrity). Reviews are of code, never of authors; findings in inherited code especially are archaeology, not blame (rseng-lessons-learned's blame-free wording).

Working with this skill

This skill is source-independent: it encodes structured code-review practice applied retrospectively to research software. It composes the pack's lenses into one undertaking and feeds rseng-project-tracking and rseng-lessons-learned.

Learn more (verified):

<!-- related-skills:begin -->

Related skills

Check whether any of these applies before moving on:

  • rseng-fairguard - assessment reruns during milestone reviews
  • rseng-legacy-code - characterization tests before implementing fixes
  • rseng-lessons-learned - findings become recorded lessons
  • rseng-project-tracking - findings become tracked tasks
  • rseng-quality-framework - tier calibrates the review bar
  • rseng-software-metrics - hotspot map scopes the review
<!-- related-skills:end -->

Reviews

No reviews yet. Tell others what you thought.

Comments

No login needed. Share how it worked for you, ask a question, or note where it did not run.

No comments yet. Be the first to write one.

Comments are published right away. Do not include personal information such as email addresses or phone numbers. Up to 2 URLs.

0 / 1,000 characters

This form is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

More skills from this repository

Covers operating AI coding agents securely: auditing whether the agent runs sandboxed, permission and dangerous-command configuration, containerized environments, secrets kept out of context, network egress and token privileges, prompt-injection risk, and the privacy of agent use itself. Use PROACTIVELY when permission gating is broadly disabled (skip-permissions modes), when secrets are visible to the agent's shell, or when the agent processes untrusted code, issues or web content; when a project holds personal or confidential data while a cloud agent is active (what leaves the machine, retention, training use), or when the user asks how to run coding agents safely or privately. (Supply-chain security: rseng-security; disclosing agent contributions: rseng-ai-declaration.)

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24Updated Sep 23, 2026

Covers declaring AI involvement with the AI Declaration Format (https://ai-declaration.org): creating and maintaining an aidecl.yaml that records which AI tools and agents were used, what each contributed, when and how much, plus the README disclosure footnote, JSON/JSON-LD export and CI validation. Machine-readable disclosure is the practice; this format is one implementation. Use PROACTIVELY when an AI assistant or agent creates or modifies a project's content - generate aidecl.yaml if missing, update it after AI-assisted changes. Also use when the user asks about AI transparency, provenance, disclosure or EU AI Act disclosure, wants to state that NO AI was used, or mentions aidecl. For concealment requests see rseng-honesty; for the human review duty see rseng-human-verification.

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24Updated Sep 23, 2026

Covers long-term archiving of research software and data: Software Heritage save requests and SWHID persistent identifiers, Zenodo deposits with versioned DOIs and forge integration, choosing domain and institutional repositories, deciding what to archive (code, data, environments, documentation) and when, and archiving at project retirement. Use when the user wants software or data preserved beyond the life of a forge account, grant or lab, mentions Software Heritage, SWHIDs, Zenodo deposits or archiving, retires or hands over a project, prepares artifacts that must stay resolvable for a paper, or when funder policy requires long-term preservation. (Cutting the release itself is rseng-publishing-releasing; day-to-day data storage and repository choice is rseng-data-management.)

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24Updated Sep 23, 2026

Covers processing research data that outgrows one machine's memory: out-of-core and chunked computation, Dask for scaling the scientific Python stack, Spark for distributed tabular pipelines, lazy evaluation, partitioning strategies, idempotent and restartable batch jobs, and knowing when NOT to distribute. Use when datasets no longer fit in memory, when the user mentions Dask, Spark, out-of-core or larger-than-memory data, when a pandas/NumPy workflow hits memory limits, or when designing batch pipelines over many files. (Cluster job submission and job arrays are rseng-hpc-computing; pipeline orchestration engines are rseng-workflows; profile first with rseng-performance-profiling.)

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24Updated Sep 23, 2026

Covers continuous integration and delivery for research software: CI/CD concepts, automating builds and tests with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD, and wiring an organization's GitLab CI infrastructure to a GitHub-hosted project. Use when the user asks to set up CI, write a pipeline or workflow file (.github/workflows, .gitlab-ci.yml), add automated builds/tests on push or pull request, publish a package or deploy docs when a tag or release is cut, cache dependencies to speed up CI runs, choose between GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, use self-hosted or GPU runners, mirror a repo, or report external CI status back to GitHub. For what to test and shrinking a test matrix see rseng-testing; for linter and pre-commit policy see rseng-code-quality.

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24Updated Sep 23, 2026

Covers verifying that every citation is real, correct and current: checking references in manuscripts, READMEs, references files and code metadata against Crossref and OpenAlex, screening cited DOIs against the Retraction Watch database, catching fabricated or mis-attributed citations (a documented AI failure mode), and keeping bibliographies and CITATION.cff files resolvable. Use PROACTIVELY before any bibliography, reference list or citation metadata is finalized or published, whenever the agent itself has produced citations, and when the user asks to check references, mentions broken DOIs, retracted papers or citation verification, or prepares a manuscript, README or software paper with references. (Making your own software citable is rseng-citation-metadata.)

The English summary is being prepared. Showing the original description.

fdiblen/rseng-agent-skills24Updated Sep 23, 2026

See all skills by fdiblen

Report a problem with this skill