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code-review is clobbered by Claude built-in skill #1234

Description

@loewenm

Skill

code-review

Harness and version

v1.3.1

Model and effort

n/a

What happened

Claude's built-in skill and your skill shares the same name: "code-review".

If you do not set disable-model-invocation to true, the agent will use Claude's built-in version by default.

I suggest renaming this skill to "review-standards-spec"

Here's a comparison of the two skills.

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  | Built-in /code-review | Your on-disk code-review
-- | -- | --
Question asked | “Is this diff buggy or messy?” | “Does it follow our standards, and does it match the spec?”
Scope | @{upstream}...HEAD plus uncommitted changes, or a PR, branch or path | <fixed-point>...HEAD, which you must supply. It asks if missing and checks the ref resolves and the diff isn’t empty.
Structure | Many angles in one finder pool: line-by-line scan, removed-behavior auditor, cross-file tracer, language pitfalls, wrapper correctness, plus reuse, simplification, efficiency, altitude and CLAUDE.md conventions | Exactly two sub-agents, Standards and Spec, run in parallel
Verification | Each candidate gets one verifier vote (CONFIRMED / PLAUSIBLE / REFUTED), then a sweep for gaps | None. Sub-agent output goes into the report mostly as-is, capped at 400 words each.
Output | Ranked findings (file, line, summary, failure_scenario), capped at 4 (low), 8 (medium) or 10 (high) | Two sections, ## Standards and ## Spec, deliberately never merged or reranked
Spec awareness | None. It never asks what the change was meant to do. | Central. It finds the spec via commit refs, an argument, or docs/, specs/ and .scratch/.
Standards | Only CLAUDE.md rules, and only when it can quote the rule and the violating line | Repo standards docs plus a fixed 12-smell Fowler baseline, always treated as judgement calls
Bug hunting | Its main job, with explicit angles for removed guards and call-site breakage | Not covered
Effort levels / flags | low to max, plus --fix, --comment, --post, ultra | None, and it pins model: sonnet
Dependencies | Self-contained | Needs docs/agents/issue-tracker.md from /setup-agentic-project

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What you expected

skill should have been named something different (e.g., "review-standards-spec") so that it can be used.

Activity

  1. floklein commented on Oct 8, 2026

    @floklein

    Yes please.

    In addition, only Codex handles similarily named skills well, as other harnesses treat skill calls as text. e.g.: pingdotgg/t3code#16788

  2. mattpocock commented on Oct 9, 2026

    @mattpocock
    Owner

    This was generated by AI during triage.

    Thanks for the comparison. When a skill shares a name with a harness built-in, I don't rename the skill: built-ins keep changing across harnesses, so no name stays safe. With the Claude Code plugin, call it by its namespaced name, /mattpocock-skills:code-review. With a skills.sh copy, the files are yours: rename the folder and the name: field (e.g. review-standards-spec). If a harness gives you no way to reach a namespaced or renamed skill, that's one to report to the harness. Closing.

    See: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/.out-of-scope/harness-name-collisions.md

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