Code Review Assistant: Automated Feedback
Set up your agent to review your code changes before you submit a PR, catching bugs, style issues, and potential improvements early in the process.
What You Will Get
After this guide, your OpenClaw agent will serve as a personal code reviewer you can consult at any time. Paste a code snippet, share a diff, or point it at a branch, and it will analyze the changes and provide detailed feedback on potential issues, improvements, and best practices.
Unlike the PR review automation that runs automatically on every pull request, the code review assistant is an on-demand tool. Use it when you want a second opinion before submitting, when you are unsure about an approach, or when you want to learn from feedback on your code patterns.
The agent provides feedback in categories: correctness issues, performance concerns, security considerations, readability improvements, and test coverage gaps. Each piece of feedback includes an explanation of why it matters and a suggested fix, so the review is educational as well as practical.
How to Set It Up
Configure your personal code reviewer
Install the Code Review Skill
Navigate to Skills and install the code-review-assistant skill. This skill equips your agent with the ability to analyze code diffs, evaluate code quality across multiple dimensions, and format feedback in a structured, actionable way.
Connect Your Repository for Context
Link the repositories you work on so the agent can understand your codebase context. The agent reviews code more effectively when it knows your project's patterns, dependencies, and conventions. Without repo access, it can still review standalone snippets, but contextual reviews are significantly more useful.
Set Your Review Preferences
Configure which aspects of code review matter most to you. Set the focus areas: security, performance, readability, test coverage, or all of the above. You can also specify your preferred language idioms and coding style so the feedback aligns with your team's conventions rather than generic best practices.
Choose Your Input Method
Decide how you will share code with the agent. You can paste code directly into chat, reference a Git branch by name, or share a diff URL. Each method works well for different scenarios: pasting is fastest for small snippets, branch references are best for reviewing a full feature, and diff URLs work when you want to review specific commits.
Run Your First Review
Share a recent code change with your agent and ask for a review. Try something like: Review the changes on the feature/user-profile branch focusing on security and test coverage. The agent will analyze the diff, check each change against your configured criteria, and return categorized feedback.
Iterate on Feedback
After receiving the review, you can ask follow-up questions about any specific feedback item. If the agent suggests refactoring a function, ask it to show you how. If it flags a security concern, ask for the specific attack vector it is worried about. The conversational format makes learning from reviews natural.
Build a Review Routine
Establish a habit of reviewing your code before every PR submission. You can set up a shortcut command like /review branch-name that triggers a full review. Over time, you will internalize the patterns the agent catches and write cleaner code from the start.
Tips and Best Practices
Review Before Pushing
Use the code review assistant on local changes before pushing to remote. This catches issues before they enter your Git history and avoids the back-and-forth of fixing comments after a PR is already open.
Ask for Specific Feedback
When you have a particular concern, tell the agent. I am worried about the error handling in this function, please focus there. Targeted reviews produce more actionable feedback than broad reviews.
Use It for Learning
When working in an unfamiliar language or framework, ask the agent to review your code with an emphasis on idiomatic patterns. It will teach you the conventions and common pitfalls specific to that technology.
Compare Approaches
If you are torn between two implementations, share both with the agent and ask it to compare. It will evaluate each approach on the dimensions you care about and help you make an informed decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Pages
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