9 Best Claude Skills for Code Review
Choose Claude skills for security, correctness, maintainability, and focused pull request review without relying on one vague review prompt.
The best Claude code-review setup is a small review pipeline, not a single giant prompt. Start with dependency-audit and least-privilege-auditor for risk, add coverage-gap-finder for behavioral confidence, then invoke specialist skills such as auth-flow-reviewer or bundle-analyzer only when the diff touches those areas.
Key takeaways
- Use several narrow skills instead of one general-purpose reviewer; each skill has a clearer trigger and a more verifiable output.
- Run read-only risk checks first, then decide whether to authorize fixes after reviewing the evidence.
- Match specialist skills to the diff: authentication, dependencies, licensing, bundle size, dead code, and tests need different review methods.
- Least-privilege-auditor is the best default for changes to IAM, CI permissions, cloud roles, tokens, and service accounts.
- Coverage-gap-finder identifies important untested branches; it does not confuse a high percentage with a strong test suite.
The best Claude skills for code review divide the job into explicit checks. A dependency review needs vulnerability evidence; a permissions review needs a map of principals and actions; a test review needs changed branches and failure modes. One prompt that says “review this PR” tends to blur all three.
Use the following shortlist as a menu. Install the checks your repository actually needs, and invoke specialist skills only when the diff enters their domain.
| Skill | Best for | Main output | Read-only by default? |
|---|---|---|---|
| dependency-audit | Package changes and known vulnerabilities | Prioritized upgrade plan | Yes |
| least-privilege-auditor | IAM, CI, cloud roles, and tokens | Excess-permission findings | Yes |
| auth-flow-reviewer | Login, sessions, authorization | Trust-boundary review | Yes |
| coverage-gap-finder | Untested changed behavior | Ranked coverage gaps | Yes |
| secret-scanner | Credentials in code or history | Secret findings and response steps | Yes |
| license-compliance-checker | Dependency license policy | Compatibility exceptions | Yes |
| dead-code-finder | Obsolete exports and paths | Evidence-backed removal candidates | Yes |
| bundle-analyzer | Front-end dependency impact | Ranked size reductions | Yes |
| skill-auditor | Reviewing SKILL.md contributions | Structure and safety findings | Yes |
1. dependency-audit: review third-party risk
dependency-audit turns lockfile or manifest changes into a prioritized report. It separates reachable, exploitable risk from noisy advisories and identifies the smallest safe upgrade path. Use it whenever a pull request adds, removes, or upgrades packages.
2. least-privilege-auditor: inspect permissions
least-privilege-auditor is the default reviewer for IAM policies, GitHub Actions permissions, cloud roles, service accounts, Kubernetes RBAC, and token scopes. It traces who can do what against which resource, then distinguishes necessary access from wildcard or inherited access that the change does not justify.
It reports evidence before proposing a narrower policy, which makes it useful even when the reviewer cannot safely edit deployment configuration.
3. auth-flow-reviewer: follow identity through the system
auth-flow-reviewer reviews authentication and authorization as a complete flow: credential entry, session creation, identity propagation, access checks, refresh, logout, and recovery. Invoke it when a diff touches middleware, cookies, JWT validation, account linking, password reset, or permission checks.
4. coverage-gap-finder: find untested behavior
coverage-gap-finder connects coverage data to important code paths. It ranks missing tests by business and failure risk rather than treating every uncovered line equally. This is the right review companion when a PR changes branching logic, error handling, retries, or state transitions.
5. secret-scanner: stop credential leaks
secret-scanner checks tracked files and relevant history for credentials and high-entropy tokens. A good finding includes the location, likely credential type, confidence, and containment steps. Treat a confirmed secret as an incident: revoke or rotate it before merely deleting the string.
6. license-compliance-checker: catch policy conflicts
license-compliance-checker inventories dependency licenses and compares them with the project's distribution model and policy. It is especially useful for commercial products, redistributed binaries, and repositories with approved-license lists.
7. dead-code-finder: prove code is unused
dead-code-finder looks for unused exports, unreachable branches, stale feature paths, and obsolete files. Its value in review is evidence: references, runtime registration, generated entry points, and framework conventions must be checked before deletion is recommended.
8. bundle-analyzer: quantify front-end cost
bundle-analyzer belongs on reviews that add UI packages, client components, polyfills, editors, charts, or large utility libraries. It measures the built artifact, identifies duplication and eager loading, and ranks changes by expected byte savings.
9. skill-auditor: review Claude skills themselves
skill-auditor checks new or modified SKILL.md files for trigger clarity, unsafe permissions, ambiguous instructions, and missing output contracts. Use it when the pull request changes the AI workflow layer rather than application code.
A practical review stack
For a normal application PR, start with dependency-audit, least-privilege-auditor, and coverage-gap-finder. Add one domain specialist based on the files changed. A login change gets auth-flow-reviewer; a client dependency gets bundle-analyzer; a Claude customization gets skill-auditor.
Install the core stack at project scope:
npx agentscamp add skills/dependency-audit
npx agentscamp add skills/least-privilege-auditor
npx agentscamp add skills/coverage-gap-finderKeep review and remediation separate. First ask Claude to produce findings with file references, impact, confidence, and a verification step. Then approve only the fixes whose behavior you understand.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the best Claude skill for code review?
- There is no single best skill for every diff. Start with dependency-audit for third-party risk, least-privilege-auditor for permissions, and coverage-gap-finder for changed behavior. Add auth-flow-reviewer when authentication or authorization code changes.
- Can Claude skills leave review comments on a pull request?
- These skills primarily inspect the local repository and produce findings. Whether Claude can post comments depends on the tools and permissions you grant it. A safer default is to review the report first and post selected findings yourself.
- Should a review skill automatically fix every finding?
- No. Review and remediation are different permission levels. Read-only review is easier to trust, while automatic fixes can alter behavior or suppress symptoms. Approve changes only after checking evidence and impact.
- How do I install a Claude code-review skill?
- Run npx agentscamp add skills/<slug> for project scope or add -g for your personal Claude skills directory. Each linked skill page also exposes its complete SKILL.md.
Related
- The Best Claude Skills to Install in 2026A skills-only tour of the AgentsCamp library — the Claude Code skills that earn a permanent slot, organized by the job they do.
- 9 Best Claude Skills for Software TestingCompare Claude skills for regression, unit, integration, contract, property, mutation, prompt, and test-data workflows.
- Least Privilege AuditorAudit application, CI, cloud, database, and agent permissions against observed usage, then produce a safe reduction plan with verification and rollback. Use when credentials have broad scopes, service roles grew organically, CI tokens can write too much, an agent or MCP server has excessive tools, or before a security review or compliance audit.
- Dependency AuditAudit project dependencies for known vulnerabilities and turn the raw scanner output into a triaged, prioritized upgrade plan. Use when an audit is noisy, a CVE was reported, or you need to know which advisories actually matter.
- Coverage Gap FinderRun the project's coverage tool and identify the highest-value untested paths — error branches, edge cases, and critical modules — then propose specific test cases for each gap. Use when you have a coverage report but don't know where new tests will pay off most.
- Auth Flow ReviewerRead-only review of authentication AND authorization flows — session/token model, cookie flags, CSRF, token rotation, password-reset/email-verification, OAuth redirect/state, and per-route object-level access checks — for exploitable gaps. Use before shipping login/session/token code, when adding a protected route or sharing-by-URL feature, or during a security pass. Reports findings by severity with location, impact, and the concrete fix; never edits code.
- Monorepo Boundary AuditorAudit a monorepo's package boundaries, dependency direction, public entry points, ownership, build graph, and affected-test rules, then report cycles and cross-layer imports with a staged repair plan. Use when packages are tightly coupled, builds invalidate too much, teams import internals, dependency cycles appear, or a monorepo migration needs enforceable architecture boundaries.