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Clean up

Code review before you ship

You cannot see the problems yourself - have AI be a harsh reviewer

  • review
  • quality
  • pre-launch

The prompt

Do a strict code review of this.

```
{{paste code}}
```

Context: {{what it does, who uses it, roughly what scale}}

Look for problems in these areas:
1. Will break: nulls, boundaries, concurrency, unhandled exceptions.
2. Will be slow: repeated work, queries or requests inside loops, render cost.
3. Is unsafe: unvalidated user input, secrets hardcoded in the frontend, missing permission checks.
4. Is unmaintainable: confusing names, muddled responsibility, missing comments where needed.

Rules:
- Rate severity for each issue (will crash / will misbehave / just ugly) with exact location and fix.
- Do not pad the list. If something is fine, say it is fine.
- If anything could cause a production incident, call it out separately at the very top.

Replace the {{}} parts with your own content

Why it works

  1. Four explicit lenses dig far deeper than "any problems?", especially on performance and security
  2. Severity ratings tell you what to fix first instead of drowning in "suggestions"
  3. "Do not pad the list" keeps the signal high, otherwise AI returns nitpicks for the sake of output
  4. Separating incident-grade issues is where a review earns its keep

What it looks like

Reviewing a submit form, AI flags missing client-side validation, no double-submit guard, and error toasts that leak raw backend messages to users.

Where it bites

  • No context on users and scale means AI either applies big-tech standards to your toy or lets it slide
  • Pasting thousands of lines at once yields only generic feedback - review module by module
When to use it
When a feature is done and about to ship or merge.
Models
Claude / GPT; long-context models review more code in one pass

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