> Regardless of what model you use, agentic coding tools are indeed pretty good at finding issues if you target them a bit. And they have no respect for their own code or any sense of shame. So, you can just point them at their own code with a new thread. Many AI models seem biased to cutting corners by default when generating code, even when you ask them not to. But a few simple follow up prompts can address that.
That's more or less all of them, they do just generate the likely combinations of tokens, there is no critical thought involved. If you want to approximate that, review iterations are probably the right way to go about it, without the full conversation context either so there's no model output like "I'm doing X because it seems like the correct way to go about Y." but rather a fresh context which allows for more critical predictions.
Here's what works for me, can be made into a skill in whatever you use:
I would like you to do a review loop!
How this works:
* once implementation is done, all tools must be run and pass: whatever is configured in the project like Ruff, Oxlint and Oxfmt, depending on the tech stack (also don't run such tools directly, look at package.json or similar project files/configurations/run scripts first; like if it's a stack that has compilation, compile the app, if there are tests, then run those; just know that you DO NOT generally need to stand up the whole app); if there is a projectlint-rules folder then that means you probably should run ProjectLint as well (local tool, use projectlint --help or projectlint --docs, or better yet, look at whether package.json or README.md have any instructions on how to run it)
* once all the code seems okay, you will run THREE parallel sub-agents for code review: each looking at ALL changed code (not each having a different sub-section) and looking for CRITICAL/SERIOUS issues (not nitpicks), with the goal of not missing anything and building consensus
* whatever CRITICAL/SERIOUS issues are found, if you can confirm that they're real and not false positives, you will then fix and remember to run the tools after, after which you will do another review iteration, followed by a fix iteration if needed and so on
* remember that the review and fix loop must END with an iteration of the review agents returning that there are no CRITICAL/SERIOUS issues - you cannot just do fixes and say that there is nothing remaining yourself (and also remember that the reviews are done when all of the tools pass, like when the code is linted and formatted etc.)
* at the end, produce a summary post that has a table, the rows being iterations, the columns for each of the agents (A, B, C) showing FIX/OK and then a column called Iteration summary; the goal for this is to show a summary how many iterations it took and what was fixed, you can also include text alongside the table as normally
The ProjectLint references might need to be removed (replace with whatever higher level linting/architecture tools you have, if any), but that's the overall idea. It does use a LOT of tokens though, but almost always there's something to fix. Of course, the problem is that sometimes there will be nitpicks or the fixes themselves won't be fully okay, though in general this trends towards slightly better code, even with something like Opus 4.7.
