receiving-code-review

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# Receiving Code Review

There are two ways to answer a reviewer badly; agreeing too readily is the
more common.

**Check each suggestion against the code before you implement it.** Every
comment is a hypothesis about code the reviewer read faster than you wrote it.
A suggestion right about the symptom and wrong about the cause is the normal
case - implementing it verbatim leaves the symptom and adds a change nobody
needed.

**"You're absolutely right", before checking, is the failure this prevents.**
It converts the reviewer's guess into your commit, removing the second opinion
review existed to give.

**Push back with technical reasoning when the reviewer is wrong.** Show the case
their suggestion breaks, the constraint it misses, or the measurement that
contradicts it - not preference or seniority. If you
cannot produce a technical reason, they are probably right.

**Treat "implement this properly" as a question about scope.** Ask what breaks
today without it. If the answer is nothing, it is a separate issue, not a
review thread.

**Read the label first** (`${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/governance/strategies.md` `S12`; an unmigrated 5.x
project uses its own copy). Issue, suggestion, nitpick, question or
praise tells you what blocks the merge before you read the argument. If it is
missing, ask rather than guess.

**Say what you did.** Per comment: changed it, or did not and why. A resolved
thread with no reply is a decision nobody can audit, and a change with no
recorded reason is an assertion. Keep it short: *"Checked -
`validate()` runs before the cache write, so that race cannot happen here. It
can on the batch path; fixed there."*

## Anti-patterns

- **Reflexive agreement** - implementing without checking.
- **Reflexive defense** - explaining why the code is fine before reading properly.
- **Silent compliance** - changing it with no reply, so the reasoning is lost.
- **Deferring on authority** - the code does not know who filed the comment.

From ayeo-io/compass, Apache-2.0.

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