A skill is a single file too thought right? Just `.claude/skills/review/SKILL.md` instead of `.claude/commands/review.md`. I think the format is more or less identical as well? I may be missing some subtle difference though. As you say, either will work fine for this, but in general Anthropic's advice is to just use skills now.
Agreed on the plan mode. I think it's personal choice and also situation-dependent. When I've already reviewed everything the agent has written and made changes along the way, I'm pretty confident a review is only going to throw up minor tweaks. When reviewing someone else's code or if you've got a load of changes you haven't reviewed yourself yet, plan mode is probably useful. I always think it's worth highlighting that plan mode isn't just 'don't make changes', it's a fundamentally different mode with a different prompt and objectives.
You should set things like this in Claude's settings.json rather than just asking the model and hoping it will obey. That way it will be enforced by the harness.
As some other comments have said, there are various other options like hooks which are run by the harness and can be used to always enforce certain things (running a formatter for example).
But for your examples, settings are the correct solution. Set an ask permission on git commit and it will always prompt you before committing. For commit messages, just set attribution commit to an empty string and it will stop adding its own attribution. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
- Hardcoding git diff against main isn't always ideal (depending on your git workflow). If you branch off of branches, the agent will figure it out, but it often has to go through a few hops to determine what to actually diff. You're better to ask it to diff 'the commits on this
branch' or similar.
- You might not necessarily want to enter plan mode for a review. I don't personally as I don't see any benefit to it writing a markdown plan file for a review.
Agreed on the plan mode. I think it's personal choice and also situation-dependent. When I've already reviewed everything the agent has written and made changes along the way, I'm pretty confident a review is only going to throw up minor tweaks. When reviewing someone else's code or if you've got a load of changes you haven't reviewed yourself yet, plan mode is probably useful. I always think it's worth highlighting that plan mode isn't just 'don't make changes', it's a fundamentally different mode with a different prompt and objectives.